Scientists Think Dark Energy May Not Actually Exist

It was only twenty years ago, when astronomers found that the universe was expanding at an accelerated rate and without an obvious reason, that the concept of dark energy was introduced. Dark energy exerts a force at the universe and is thought to make up sixty eight percentage of it.

However, there are no accepted candidates for what dark energy is and the debate approximately its very existence has raged since its first suggestion. A new paper, published in the monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shows that we might not want dark energy after all.

The study, led by researchers on the Eötvös Loránd university in Hungary, suggests that matching specific astronomical observations with the approximated models of the universe might have created the need for dark energy while, in reality, it doesn’t exist. in the words of Shakespeare, the fault isn't in our stars however in ourselves.

The different areas in the universe, they consider, expand at different rates depending on how matter is distributed there while the cosmos keeps an average accelerated expansion. Current standard models do not take this into consideration.

"Einstein’s equations of general relativity that describe the expansion of the universe are so complex mathematically, that for 100 years no solutions accounting for the effect of cosmic structures have been discovered,” co-author Dr László Dobos, stated in a statement.

“We understand from very precise supernova observations that the universe is accelerating, but at the same time we depend on coarse approximations to Einstein’s equations which may introduce serious side-effects, such as the want for dark energy, in the models designed to fit the observational information."
To test this the researchers constructed a computer simulation to compare a standard cosmological model (with normal matter, dark energy, and the equally mysterious dark matter) with one that only had dark matter and common matter. The requirement was that the latter one, called the Avera (average expansion rate Approximation) model, has the same critical density as the standard model.

The simulations show an excellent agreement between each other and between the observations both in the early and recent universe. The Avera model does actually better fit the apparent discrepancy between the local and past expansion rates of the universe.

This concept is an interesting addition to the universe expansion debate, although it is still too early to tell if it is able to deal a fatal blow to dark energy.