Scientists have therefore had more than 20 years to decode the secrets of this invisible substance that appears to be pulling the universe apart. Yet, they still know close to nothing about it. Dark energy, in fact, may not even be a substance. It could be a force or even an intrinsic property of space itself. . If constant, the mysterious dark energy that makes up a whopping 70 percent of the universe would push away alland galaxies.
"If this is true, this just turns cosmology upside down," said Dillon Brout of Boston University, who measures the acceleration of the universe with, pinpoints positions of a million galaxies each month. Through these observations, cosmologists can measure the universe's expansion rate as it increased over the past 11 billion years.
This"is the next generation of data we've been waiting a long time for, so it's really nice to see it having arrived," said Brout, who is not involved with the DESI collaboration. Because light from typical galaxies is too faint to see, as those galaxies sit very far away from us and the light they emit is relatively low-intensity, the DESI collaboration also studied over 400,000 intensely bright objects called, it gets absorbed by clouds of gas and dust, helping cosmologists map pockets of dense matter in a similar way to mapping galaxies.