Our best models of the cosmos don't add up — but that could change if the universe is actually made of a viscous 'fluid,' a ...

Dark energy—the term used to describe whatever is causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate—is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. The widely accepted theory at the present moment ...

Dark energy may be the most mysterious substance ever proposed, but many scientists are certain it exists. Why?

As I finished my PhD in 1992, the universe was full of mystery – we didn’t even know exactly what it is made of. One could argue that cosmologists had made little progress in our understanding of ...

For a generation, cosmologists have treated dark energy as a fixed backdrop, a steady pressure stretching space faster and ...

The standard cosmological model known as Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) proposes that dark energy is a constant force in the universe. However, an early “hint” in a new detailed map from the Dark Energy ...

For a quarter century, cosmology has rested on a simple but audacious idea: that a fixed “cosmological constant” drives the ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: A new paper adjusts an equation that defines our universe in response to recent new data. The cosmological constant, which describes how our universe ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be ...

In the late 1990s, two teams of astronomers were out to settle a score. Cosmologists had been at odds for over a decade in their quest to measure the total amount of matter and energy in the universe.

Astrophysicists have presumed for nearly a century that the universe will just keep expanding for all eternity, driven by an invisible force called dark energy. But new data suggest that this is ...

For over a century, scientists have wondered what is counteracting the force of gravity in the universe. The universe is vast, almost beyond comprehension. It has an estimated diameter of 93 billion ...