The Dark Energy theory, which would explain the acceleration and expansion of the Universe, has seen its number of followers drop dramatically.
The drop in popularity is no accident: All attempts to find any basis in reality for Dark Energy have so far failed.
Until the end of the last century, scientists believed that space is filled with ordinary matter — stars, planets, asteroids, comets and highly rarefied intergalactic gas. But, if this is so, then accelerated expansion is contrary to the law of gravity, which says that bodies are attracted to each other. Gravitational forces tend to slow down the expansion of the universe, but cannot accelerate it.
But then the telescopes improved and measurements began to indicate that very distant stars and galaxies would be moving away from us at faster rate - which indicates that the Universe is not just expanding, but expanding with acceleration.
“And then the idea was born that the Universe is filled for the most part not with ordinary matter, but with some “dark energy,” which has special properties. No one knows what is it and how it works, so it named “Dark Energy” as something unknown. And 70% of the Universe consists of this Energy.” contextualizes Professor Artyom Astashenok, from Immanuel Kant University, in Russia.
As the observational results to support this theory do not appear, Astashenok and his colleague Alexander Tepliakov went to look for explanations for the acceleration and expansion of the Universe that can work without having to appeal to Dark Energy or any other unknown entity.
And they found something that makes sense, just adding an idea that is not entirely foreign to physicists either: the proposal that the Universe has "edges".
Frontiers of the Universe
In their article, the pair presents a mathematically solid model of the Universe in which there is an additional repulsion capable of explaining the acceleration of expansion, and in which there is no contradiction between the fact that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and the law of gravitation. universal.Professor Astashenok himself explains the new theory: “The so-called Casimir effect (named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir), which consists in the fact that two metal plates placed in a vacuum are attracted to each other, has long been known. It would seem that this cannot be, because there is nothing in the vacuum. But in fact, according to quantum theory, particles constantly appear and disappear there, and as a result of their interaction with plates, which indicate certain boundaries of space (which is extremely important), a very small attraction occurs. And there is an idea according to this, approximately the same thing happens in space. Only this leads, on the contrary, to additional repulsion, which accelerates the expansion of the Universe. That is, there is essentially no “Dark Energy,” but there is a manifestation of the boundaries of the Universe. This, of course, does not mean that it ends somewhere, but some kind of complex topology can take place. You can draw an analogy with the Earth. After all, it also has no boundaries, but it is finite. The difference between the Earth and the Universe is that in the first case we are dealing with two-dimensional space, and in the second — with three-dimensional.”
This is not the first time that an attempt has been made to create a way to dispense with dark energy , and it probably will not be the last.
After all, a whole generation of scientists graduated from this theory, the scientific community gave it the highest honor - the Nobel Prize in Physics - and millionaire projects are underway, which means that not everyone is willing to abandon the idea of finding evidence of the so famous unknown energy.
| Bibliography: Article: Some models of holographic dark energy on the Randall-Sundrum brane and observational data Authors: Artem V. Astashenok, Alexander S. Tepliakov Magazine: International Journal of Modern Physics D DOI: 10.1142 / S0218271819501761 |
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Space & Astrophysics