Gravity’s gentle tug on the cosmos: Newton’s law of universal gravitation says that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. This creates enormous islands in the sky that go round in circles. Many bodies spin around until something eventually takes them out.
These galaxies spin one hundred times faster than they should, given the weight of their total mass. Dark matter is the reason why. Our solar system is moving along at quite a clip. Stars in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, including our Sun, orbit at an average speed of 130 miles per second. The most massive spiral galaxies. “Super spirals,” which are more significant, brighter, and more massive than the Milky Way, spin even faster than expected for their mass, at speeds up to 350 miles per second. Their rapid spin results from sitting within an extraordinarily massive cloud, or halo, of dark matter—invisible matter detectable only through gravity. The most significant “super spiral” studied here resides in a dark matter halo weighing at least 40 trillion times the mass of our Sun.
OR, ON THE OTHER HAND, WHAT IF 70% OF THE UNIVERSE ISN’T DARK ENERGY AFTER ALL? Researchers have tested a model suggesting the universe’s expansion is due to a dark substance with a magnetic force, not dark energy. Until now, researchers have believed that dark energy accounted for nearly 70% of the ever-accelerating, expanding universe. Dark energy cannot be measured directly. Is this new model correct?
This is why dark energy must exist, despite recent reports to the contrary. As time passes and the matter density drops while the dark energy density doesn’t, dark energy becomes more important than everything else. The more distant a galaxy is, the faster and faster it will appear to recede from us, with that speed increasing as time goes on.
THE ANSWER IS, THERE IS NO ANSWER.
Vacuum energy: Vacuum energy is the underlying background energy in space and throughout the universe. Vacuum energy is a case of zero-point energy related to the quantum vacuum. According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of the quantum field. It is the transient status of certain particles in the quantum field of space.
In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem, or vacuum catastrophe, is the disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small matter of the cosmological constant) and the sizeable theoretical value of zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory. It is the most significant discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science and the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.
The answer lies somewhere beyond the uncertainty principle.
The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. And that is extremely surprising because gravity is attractive, but we don’t know what dark energy is. Is it an accelerated expansion or inflation? This is a distinction without a difference.
Tying together the quantum realm with the cosmic world is in the works.
