Antarctic Observations Confirm Existence of Dark Energy, Dark Matter

Studies of the CMB during the 1960s and 1970s revealed two basic facts. First, the “average temperature” of the universe was only about 3 degrees above Absolute Zero on the Kelvin scale (equivalent to -459 degrees F or -273 degrees C). Second, this was the observed temperature NO MATTER WHICH WAY YOU LOOKED INTO SPACE. This fact, along with some additional handwaving we won’t go into here, is basically why we think the universe blew up in a “big bang” and is still expanding today. In the 1980s a satellite called COBE discovered that although the AVERAGE temperature was indeed around 3 degrees K no matter where you looked, in fact some parts of the sky were hotter or colder by a mere millionth-of-a-degree. Doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t – but it’s enough to give scientists significantly more data and almost religious levels of insight on what the initial “big bang” explosion had to be like. The COBE data was so exciting that NASA immediately sent up an even more sensitive satellite called MAP that is still slowly making a temperature map of the sky today in its ongoing mission. The problem with space missions like COBE and MAP is that they depend on a limited supply of liquid helium coolant to work – once the helium is gone, the mission is over.

The next best place to make temperature maps of the sky besides satellites in space is Antarctica. One instrument at the South Pole set up to do this is the Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR). In the past week, initial results from ACBAR have been released and they show that major new discoveries remain to be made regarding the CMB. In particular, the data seems to say our universe made of 65% dark energy, 30% so-called dark matter and only 5% of the normal-energy light and normal-matter atoms with which humans are familiar. MAP is expected to shed even more, er, light, on this 95% of the universe that is only now penetrating our awareness. No word yet on editing or correcting Genesis

2 thoughts on “Antarctic Observations Confirm Existence of Dark Energy, Dark Matter”

  1. I read something close to those numbers in Physics Today probably a year ago. It’s good that they’re agreeing, but I think the existing experiments already had pretty tight constraints on the possibilities. And yes, it’s very interesting that 95% of the universe (by mass) is something we know nothing about. So much for “the end of science”…

  2. Sirs, please tell me what you think about this theory (sorry for my mean English but it’s not my natural language).

    If every point in the actual universe perceives (meaning that it’s under the effect of light and gravity) at the speed of light, then we should not calculate the forces acting on it from the surrounding “present time”, but those from an enourmous sphere (13,7 billions light years of diameter in continuous expantion!) filled with spirally shaped masses always lower in density, the outer surface being nothing less that mr Big Bang, followed by “pasts” of all our surroundings, more recent way you close in to the point: now (a void?).
    Spirally floating immense masses all around in the distance; the pendulum of Foucault on a major scale: what they call “dark energy”, then would easily be gravity.
    While, on the other hand, galaxies formed before expected and stay together “too well” for the masses we’re observing in the near universe, and that’s because their atoms “feel” much more mass around them then there really is. When a mass speedens up, its effects on other objects increase because it “stretches” between times and appears “there and then” but ALSO “here and now”, so that it doubles, triples, etc its mass (relativity, nothing new).

    Make me know what you think at my email address, please, because I don’t know when I’ll return here next.

    Lorenzo
    lpeyrani@hotmail.com

    PS: about the great masses I’m talking about, take a look at this link:

    http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0107filament.html

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