Finally some answers on dark energy, the mysterious master of the Universe

Star trails swirl around Polaris, above the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. (credit: Ethan Tweedie Photography)

Unless you’re an astrophysicist, you probably don’t sit around thinking about dark energy all that often. That's understandable, as dark energy doesn’t really affect anyone’s life. But when you stop to ponder dark energy, it's really rather remarkable. This mysterious force, which makes up the bulk of the Universe but was only discovered 17 years ago, somehow is blasting the vast cosmos apart at ever-increasing rates.

Astrophysicists do sit around and think about dark energy a lot. And they’re desperate for more information about it as, right now, they have essentially two data points. One shows the Universe in its infancy, at 380,000 years old, thanks to observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. And by pointing their telescopes into the sky and looking about, they can measure the expansion rate of the Universe.

But astronomers would desperately like to know what happened in between the Big Bang and now. Is dark energy constant, or is it accelerating? Or, more crazily still, might it be about to undergo some kind of phase change and turn everything into ice, as ice-nine did in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle? Probably not, but really, no one knows.

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