New method supports dark energy

BBC : An international team of astronomers has used the results from a major astronomical survey to confirm the existence of dark energy, estimated to make up about 74% of the total massenergy of the universe. The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, which was carried out August 2006January 2011, used data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope to map the distribution of some 200 000 galaxies and look back in time about 8 billion years. The astronomers used two separate kinds of observation to provide an independent check on previous dark-energy results, writes Paul Rincon for the BBC. The concept of dark energy was first invoked in the late 1990s to reconcile the measured geometry of space with the total amount of matter in the universe and to explain why the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate.