{"id":824,"date":"2006-11-17T11:33:45","date_gmt":"2006-11-17T11:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/17\/still-in-the-dark\/"},"modified":"2006-11-17T11:33:45","modified_gmt":"2006-11-17T11:33:45","slug":"still-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/17\/still-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Still in the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"

The dark energy press conference<\/a> mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times<\/cite><\/a>. You can also get information straight from NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very long time ago. From those measurements, they have made a rough measurement of the expansion of the universe at that time, and find that the mysterious “dark energy” that appears to be causing the modern universe to expand faster over time was also making the universe expand faster ten billion years ago.<\/p>\n

This is useful information because we have absolutely no idea what the “dark energy” is, and when you’re in that position, any data are good data. Given that we have no idea what causes the effect, there’s no a priori<\/i> reason why it couldn’t change sign, sometimes speeding the expansion up, sometimes slowing it down. The fact that it had the same basic effect in the past that it does today at least limits the possible explanations somewhat.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty much with Clifford<\/a> on this one. It’s interesting news, but not as interesting as the Bullet Cluster stuff. I’m not sure it really deserves a splashy press-conference rollout, but then NASA probably feels some pressure to have splashy press conferences on a regular basis, so maybe this is the best they have this month. And it is<\/strong> cool science.<\/p>\n

But we don’t really know all that much more about dark energy than we did yesterday at this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA. The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very… Continue reading Still in the Dark<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}