If you're a fan of learning new stuff and you don't want it to take up too much of your day, you are in the right place because this is Curiosity Daily from Discovery. My name is Nate. How the heck are you guys? I'm

Callie and this is Curiosity. Today you'll learn about a

tantalizing new discovery about dark energy that could change our

understanding of the entire universe, how scientists are pulling

electricity from raindrops, and the barcode memory tool inside a chickadee's brain.

You know, I'm really excited about these stories today.

An international team of astronomers who are part of a project called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or Desi,

are undertaking a five-year plan to create what has been called the world's biggest and most accurate survey of the universe.

So what does that mean in this context a survey?

Well it's like a three-dimensional map with the positions and velocities of about 40 million galaxies spanning some 11 billion years of cosmic time.

So I mentioned a road Alice except instead of being on the ground all the cities are floating up in space and they're all moving in

different directions. For the Alice to have any real value it should be able to tell you where those

galaxies have been where they are now and where they're likely going.

Yeah, that just sort of exploded my brain a little bit.

Well, just wait because it gets better.

They're only in year one of the five-year project and they recently announced a finding that could

change the course of our universe and it has everything to do with dark energy.

Okay, so I know just the tiniest bit about dark energy. As I understand it, dark energy and dark matter are these

mysterious forces that make up a huge part of our universe. But beyond that, I'm... I'm in the dark.

Aha! Okay, well, to be fair, astronomers and astrophysicists still don't know all that much about it either, so you're in good company.

But you're right, dark energy makes up around 70% of the total energy content of the universe. It was discovered in the

1990s, so not all that long ago, and the best way to explain it is to explain what it does. It has something to do with the expansion of the universe right?

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