By Andrew Chaikin
Editor, Space & Science
add and edited by:
Edited by:
Arip Nurahman
(Teacher and Professional Lecturer)
Guru dan Dosen Profesional
Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics
Indonesia University of Education and Follower Open Course Ware at MIT-Harvard University, M.A., U.S.A.
Edited by:
Arip Nurahman
(Teacher and Professional Lecturer)
Guru dan Dosen Profesional
Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics
Indonesia University of Education and Follower Open Course Ware at MIT-Harvard University, M.A., U.S.A.
It sounds like something out of a Star Trek episode: Dark energy, a mysterious force that no one understands, is causing the universe to fly apart faster and faster. Only a few years ago, if you'd suggested something like that to astronomers, they would have told you to spend less time in front of the TV and more time in the "real" world.
But dark energy is real or at least, a growing number of astronomers think it is. No one, however, can truly explain it.
"Frankly, we just dont understand it," says Craig Hogan, an astronomer at the University of Washington at Seattle. "We know what its effects are," Hogan says, but as to the details of dark energy, "Were completely clueless about that. And everybodys clueless about it."
Dark energy entered the astronomical scene in 1998, after two groups of astronomers made a survey of exploding stars, or supernovas, in a number of distant galaxies. These researchers found that the supernovas were dimmer than they should have been, and that meant they were farther away than they should have been. The only way for that to happen, the astronomers realized, was if the expansion of the universe had sped up at some time in the past.
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Until then, astronomers had generally believed that the cosmic expansion was gradually slowing down, due to the gravitational tugs that individual galaxies exert on one another. But the supernova results implied that some mysterious force was acting against the pull of gravity, causing galaxies to fly away from each other at ever greater speeds.
It was a stunning realization.
At first, other researchers questioned the result; perhaps the supernovas were dimmer because their light was being blocked by clouds of interstellar dust. Or maybe the supernovas themselves were intrinsically dimmer than scientists thought. But with careful checking, and more data, those explanations have largely been put aside, and the dark energy hypothesis has held up.
In one sense, the idea is not completely new. Einstein had included such an "anti-gravity" effect in his theory of general relativity, in his so-called cosmological constant. But Einstein himself, and later many other astronomers, came to regard this as a kind of mathematical contrivance that had little relationship to the real universe. By the 1990s no one expected that the effect would turn out to be real.
Still, anti-gravity isnt the right way to describe dark energy, says Virginia Trimble of the University of Southern California at Irvine.
"It doesnt act opposite to gravity," Trimble says. "It does exactly what general relativity says it should do, if it has negative pressure."
Trimble has a fairly simple way of imagining the phenomenon.
"If you think in terms of the universe as a very large balloon," she says, "when the balloon expands, that makes the local density of the [dark energy] smaller, and so the balloon expands some more . because it exerts negative pressure. While its inside the balloon its trying to pull the balloon back together again, and the lower the density of it there is, the less it can pull back, and the more it expands. This is what happens in the expanding universe."
The supernova evidence suggests that the acceleration kicked in about 5 billion years ago. At that time, galaxies were far enough apart that their gravity (which weakens with distance) was overwhelmed by the relatively gentle but constant repulsive force of dark energy. Since then, dark energy's continuing push has been causing the cosmic expansion to speed up, and it seems likely now that this expansion will continue indefinitely.
"It means that if you look out at the universe today, and if we wait many billions of years," says Hogan, "everything will be flying away faster and faster, and eventually well be left quite alone."
Aside from such grim forecasts, dark energy is causing quite a bit of upset for astronomers who have to adjust to an unexpected and outlandish new view of the universe. Already, they have had to accept the notion of dark matter, which is now thought to far outnumber ordinary matter in the universe, but which has never been detected in any laboratory. Now, the arrival of an unknown force that rules cosmic expansion has added insult to injury.
"I'm as big a fan of dark matter and dark energy as anybody else," says astronomer Richard Ellis of Caltech. But, he adds, "I find it very worrying that you have a universe where there are three constituents, of which only one [i.e., ordinary matter] is really physically understood."
"When you teach undergraduates, and they say, 'Well, what is dark matter?' Well, nobody's really sure. 'What is dark energy?' We're even less sure. So you have to explain to a student, that 90 percent of the universe, 95 percent, is in two ingredients that nobody really understands," says Ellis. "This isn't really progress."
No one argues that dark energy is difficult to comprehend. And as Trimble points out, it is hardly the first strange idea scientists have had to accept.
"It took two generations for people to be comfortable with quantum mechanics," she says. "The fact that you do not have good intuition about [dark energy] is true for quantum mechanics, general relativity, and lots of other things, because we cant easily mock them up in the laboratory."
And for cosmologists, dark energy has solved at least one cosmological conundrum raised by studies of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB.
History of Dark Energy
The cosmological constant was first proposed by Einstein as a mechanism to obtain a stable solution of the gravitational field equation that would lead to a static universe, effectively using dark energy to balance gravity. Not only was the mechanism an inelegant example of fine-tuning, it was soon realized that Einstein's static universe would actually be unstable because local inhomogeneities would ultimately lead to either the runaway expansion or contraction of the universe.
The equilibrium is unstable: if the universe expands slightly, then the expansion releases vacuum energy, which causes yet more expansion. Likewise, a universe which contracts slightly will continue contracting. These sorts of disturbances are inevitable, due to the uneven distribution of matter throughout the universe. More importantly, observations made by Edwin Hubble showed that the universe appears to be expanding and not static at all. Einstein famously referred to his failure to predict the idea of a dynamic universe, in contrast to a static universe, as his greatest blunder. Following this realization, the cosmological constant was largely ignored as a historical curiosity.
Alan Guth proposed in the 1970s that a negative pressure field, similar in concept to dark energy, could drive cosmic inflation in the very early universe. Inflation postulates that some repulsive force, qualitatively similar to dark energy, resulted in an enormous and exponential expansion of the universe slightly after the Big Bang. Such expansion is an essential feature of most current models of the Big Bang. However, inflation must have occurred at a much higher energy density than the dark energy we observe today and is thought to have completely ended when the universe was just a fraction of a second old. It is unclear what relation, if any, exists between dark energy and inflation. Even after inflationary models became accepted, the cosmological constant was thought to be irrelevant to the current universe.
The term "dark energy" was coined by Michael Turner in 1998, a term similar to Fritz Zwicky's "Dark Matter" coined in the 1930's.
By that time, the missing mass problem of big bang nucleosynthesis and large scale structure was established, and some cosmologists had started to theorize that there was an additional component to our universe.
The first direct evidence for dark energy came from supernova observations of accelerated expansion, in Riess et al. and later confirmed in Perlmutter et al...This resulted in the Lambda-CDM model, which as of 2006 is consistent with a series of increasingly rigorous cosmological observations, the latest being the 2005 Supernova Legacy Survey.
First results from the SNLS reveal that the average behavior (i.e., equation of state) of dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision of 10%.
Recent results from the Hubble Space Telescope Higher-Z Team indicate that dark energy has been present for at least 9 billion years and during the period preceding cosmic acceleration.
By that time, the missing mass problem of big bang nucleosynthesis and large scale structure was established, and some cosmologists had started to theorize that there was an additional component to our universe.
The first direct evidence for dark energy came from supernova observations of accelerated expansion, in Riess et al. and later confirmed in Perlmutter et al...This resulted in the Lambda-CDM model, which as of 2006 is consistent with a series of increasingly rigorous cosmological observations, the latest being the 2005 Supernova Legacy Survey.
First results from the SNLS reveal that the average behavior (i.e., equation of state) of dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision of 10%.
Recent results from the Hubble Space Telescope Higher-Z Team indicate that dark energy has been present for at least 9 billion years and during the period preceding cosmic acceleration.
References
- ^ P. J. E. Peebles and Bharat Ratra (2003). "The cosmological constant and dark energy" (subscription required). Reviews of Modern Physics 75: 559–606. doi:. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0207347.
- ^ a b Hinshaw, Gary F. (April 30th, 2008). "WMAP Cosmological Parameters Model: lcdm+sz+lens Data: wmap5". NASA. http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/params/lcdm_sz_lens_wmap5.cfm. Retrieved 2009-05-24.
- ^ Sean Carroll (2001). "The cosmological constant". Living Reviews in Relativity 4: 1. doi:10.1038/nphys815-. http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2001-1/index.html. Retrieved 2006-09-28.
- ^ L.Baum and P.H. Frampton (2007). "Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology" (subscription required). Physical Review Letters 98: 071301. doi:. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610213.
- ^ a b Adam G. Riess et al. (Supernova Search Team) (1998). "Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant" (subscription required). Astronomical J. 116: 1009–38. doi:. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9805201.
- ^ a b S. Perlmutter et al. (The Supernova Cosmology Project) (1999). "Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 high redshift supernovae" (subscription required). Astrophysical J. 517: 565–86. doi:. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9812133.
- ^ a b D. N. Spergel et al. (WMAP collaboration) (March 2006). Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) three year results: implications for cosmology. http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/map_bibliography.cfm.
- ^ Kowalski, Marek; Rubin, David (October 27th, 2008). "Improved Cosmological Constraints from New, Old and Combined Supernova Datasets". The Astrophysical Journal (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press) 686: 749-778. doi:. arΧiv:0804.4142v1.
Perbaikan:
Ke-1: 11-10-2009
Arip Nurahman
Guru dan Dosen Profesional
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