The universe is becoming more chaotic and we don’t know why. The main suspect is dark energy

From the first moments after the Big Bang, gravity has shaped the matter, giving rise to the intricate structures that define our universe. Galaxies, galaxy clusters and galactic filaments have evolved in ways that They almost always agree with Einstein’s general relativity theory. But something does not fit.

The universe is more messy. A Recent study Directed by cosmologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the United States Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory points out that the universe has become “more messy and complicated” over time. There are fewer agglomerations of the subject that predict physical models.

The research crosses two very different types of data observed by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the spectroscopic instrument of Arizona’s dark energy. Combining both maps, scientists discovered that almost the whole history of structure formation coincides with the predictions of Einstein’s gravity, except for a small discrepancy in the agglomeration of matter of more recent times; For about 4,000 million years.

A cosmic tomography. To build a multidimensional vision of the cosmos, scientists started from the oldest light we can observe: The cosmic microwave backgrounda radiation from 14,000 million years ago, when the universe was only 380,000 years old. But the journey of this ancestral light has not been in a straight line. It has been diverting and distorting the gravitational attraction of mass structures such as galaxies clusters, a predicted phenomenon by Einstein and known as gravitational lens.

Overcoming the map of these distortions with the distribution of galaxies has allowed cosmologists to infer how matter is distributed over time. “It’s like a cosmic computerized tomography,” said Mathew Madhavacheril, co -author of the study, In a statement. “We can look through different cuts of cosmic history and track how matter has been agglomerating at different times.”

Something does not fit. The “agglomeration” of matter (measured by density fluctuations) seems to be slightly lower in the most recent times than the models predict from the early universe. Cosmic structures have been grouped less intensely than we expected.

The researchers are cautious: it is a small discrepancy that could be the result of chance and not the test of new physics. However, if the deviation turned out to be A statistical anomalycould point to unknown physical processes that influence how cosmic structures are formed and evolved.

One of the hypotheses is that It has to do with dark energythe mysterious force responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Perhaps dark energy is affecting the formation of structures in ways that current models do not capture completely, acting as a powerful force that moderates the large -scale agglomeration.

Image | NASA, ESA, CSA

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