New Scientist - USA (2020-11-28)

(Antfer) #1

a term to the equations called the
“cosmological constant” to stop the universe
expanding wildly or collapsing in on itself.
A few years later, however, astronomer
Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies
were speeding away from our own, and
thus that the universe was expanding. This
meant it must have begun in a hot, dense
state that came to be known as the big bang.
Then, in the 1990s, two groups of
astronomers used light from exploding
stars to demonstrate that this expansion
is accelerating, an effect we now tend to
attribute to a mysterious repulsive force –
“dark energy” – which, as it turns out,
looks a lot like the cosmological constant. >

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