Photo #1 (January 2007)

 MYSTERIOUS ENERGIES IN SPACE

       Ah, not to be cut off,
       not through the slightest partition shut out
       from the law of the stars.
       The inner -- what is it?
       if not intensified sky,
       hurled through with birds
       and deep with the winds of homecoming.
                            - Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Credit: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA

Eight years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. Evidence is accumulating that so-called 'empty space' is where most of the energies of the universe can be found. This has been called 'zero point energy' or 'dark energy.' We have no way to measure or tap into this energy directly, as yet. It is so powerful, however, that it appears to be causing the starts and galaxies to expand in all directions.  Such claims were not usually popular with astronomers, though, because this energy is so unlike known universe components and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda had previously done well in explaining the data. What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations. Over the past eight years, independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the unsettling result. The above picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations.