A team of international scientists said that the existence of galactic “deserts” to prove the reality of dark energy.
The observation of large clusters of galaxies in the visible Universe and space “deserts” between them have helped scientists confirm that the mysterious dark energy that causing the Universe to expand faster, there is indeed, according to a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“We invented a new method of conducting highly accurate observations of how these regions of space affect the microwave background radiation of the Universe – the light echoes left over from the Big Bang, whose photons undergo on their way to Earth. The gravity of these objects needs to bend the light, and if dark energy exists, then the photons from the “deserts” will be a little colder than the photons from clusters of galaxies,” says Secondry of Nadathur (Sesandri Nadathur) from the University of Portsmouth (UK).
For a long time, cosmologists believed that our universe grows with constant speed, which is almost unchanged. In 1998, the Nobel prize winners Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess showed the, watching the supernova explosions of the first type that it’s actually not so – it turned out that the limits of the universe expand faster and faster.
The reason for this acceleration, as it is today according to scientists, dark energy – the mysterious substance with an exotic properties, whose share accounts for 70% of the content of the Universe. We know almost nothing about its properties, and today scientists are trying to find traces of dark energy in the movements of galaxies and the microwave background radiation.
Using new methods of observations, Nadathur and his colleague Robert Crittenden (Robert Crittenden) tried to find traces of dark energy in the “stretching” of photons “echo” of the Big Bang, using the images of distant clusters of galaxies and voids between them, obtained by the SDSS survey, and data on the fluctuations in the microwave background of the Universe collected by the orbital telescope “Planck”.
Attempts to carry out such measurements, it tells of Nadathur, was conducted before according to the probe WMAP, the small number of galaxies, however, the strength of the curvature of light under the action of dark energy was five times higher than predicted by the cosmological model of the Universe. For this reason most cosmologists are extremely critical of the results of these calculations, considering them a mistake.
Using pictures more than 700 thousands of distant galaxies, and data “echo” of the Big Bang in their vicinity, Crittenden and Nadathur checked whether their predecessors were wrong. As shown by their own measurements, the effect of the stretching of light really exists, but his power laid in the predictions of the classical theory of the Big Bang.
For example, the temperature of microwave radiation coming from the galactic “desert” turned out to 15-5 of microkelvins less than average values, and “echo of the Big Bang”, passing through clusters of galaxies, was 5-10 microkelvin “warmer” of the rule.
Coupled with other data on dark energy, which were obtained recently, these results, as according to British cosmologists, testify in favor of the fact that it does exist. Remains the most difficult task is to understand how we will be able to see it and to study its properties.
