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An international team of scientists suggests that the accelerated expansion of the Universe could be caused by a mysterious substance called “quintessence” that permeates the cosmos.
The tentative hypothesis could offer tantalizing new clues to the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force that physicists believe is responsible for the increasing speed at which the universe is expanding.
But the researchers’ conclusions – and their broad and sweeping implications – have left some of their colleagues questioning the idea, since Nature relationships.
The theory that dark energy is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe was first proposed in 1998, when researchers found that the amount of the mysterious force was fixed per unit volume of space as a “cosmological constant”.
However, not all scientists fully adhere to the theory Nature points out, arguing instead that dark energy is composed of a “fifth element”, or what researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany now call quintessence. As they frame it, quintessence is neither an intrinsic property of space determined by a constant nor a form of matter. If dark energy were indeed such a quintessence, this would mean that its density would decrease over time as the galaxy expands.
To test the theory, the researchers initially hypothesized that quintessence was supposed to affect light in a certain way as it spread throughout the cosmos.
In 1998, second Nature, a team of scientists led by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has suggested that it would be technically possible to find evidence of what is happening.
They suggested that by looking at maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the residual electromagnetic radiation left over from the earliest stages of the universe – scientists could theoretically look for some light signatures to prove the quintessence theory.
These light signatures would show electric fields of polarized light that “oscillate” in specific directions, they suggested, rather than any other direction.
And that’s exactly what two cosmologists from KEK and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany claim to have done, as detailed in an article published in the journal. Physical Review Letters this week.
By examining CMB data from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, they were able to spot the quintessential signs using an entirely new technique.
But the discovery is still far from being set in stone: Physicists are warning that the evidence is not yet complete, such as Nature relationships.
If confirmed by further research, however, the theory could have drastic consequences for our understanding of the universe. If dark energy were truly quintessential, the expansion could actually slow down and eventually disappear altogether.
The process could also be reversed, causing the universe to crumble like a can of soda, according to Carroll, who was not involved in the study.
“We’re back to a situation where we have no idea how the Universe is going to turn out,” Carroll said Nature.
READ MORE: Hints of twisted light offer clues to the nature of dark energy [Nature]
More on universe expansion: To measure the expansion of the universe, we may need new physics
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