What a dark energy discovery means for the fate of the universe

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 938 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening over time, according to a major cosmological survey that has thrown the laws of modern physics into doubt. Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay how this new finding could shed light on the ultimate fate of the cosmos, and Saul Perlmutter, who won a Nobel prize for his work proving the universe is expanding, describes how the new development could upend assumptions about how this mysterious force operates. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:08.4	Science Weekly is supported by Aionos.
0:13.1	Aionos has been building hosting, websites and cloud solutions for over 35 years.
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1:38.3	The universe started with a big bang.
1:44.8	After this initial rapid cosmic inflation, things slowed down.
1:51.8	And for a long time, scientists thought that the expansion of the universe would continue to decelerate,
1:54.2	pulled back by the force of gravity.
2:00.2	Just like when a ball is thrown up into the air, it eventually slows and falls back down. So you can imagine the surprise when,
2:04.3	in 1998, researchers discovered that the ball was not coming back. It was, in fact, flying away
2:12.3	faster and faster. It turned out that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This strange
2:21.4	observation left another difficult problem. Why? What was this mysterious, propulsive force?
	...

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