Mysteries of a Dark Universe

DARK ENERGY in Full HD 1080p. Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate. Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us? The astronomers whose data revealed this accelerating universe have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. And yet, since 1998, when the discovery was first announced, scientists have struggled to come to grips with a mysterious presence that now appears to control the future of the cosmos: dark energy. On remote mountaintops around the world, major astronomical centers hum along, with state of the art digital sensors, computers, air conditioning, infrastructure, and motors to turn the giant telescopes. Deep in Chile’s Atacama desert, the Paranal Observatory is an astronomical Mecca. This facility draws two megawatts of power, enough for around two thousand homes. What astronomers get for all this is photons, tiny mass-less particles of light. They stream in from across time and space by the trillions from nearby sources, down to one or two per second from objects at the edge of the visible universe. In this age of precision astronomy, observers have been studying the properties of these particles, to find clues to how stars live and die, how galaxies form, how black holes grow, and more. But for all we’ve learned, we are finding out just how much still eludes our grasp, how short our …
Video Rating: 4 / 5