Dark Energy Independently Confirmed

Via Scientific American -

In 1998 two teams of researchers made a milestone cosmological announcement: The universe, long known to be expanding, was not slowing down in its expansion as expected but was in fact accelerating. Both groups had been studying exploding stars, or supernovae, and used the objects' movement to show that the universe is speeding up. The culprit was labeled dark energy—a hypothesized presence that pervades space and pushes the pieces of the universe apart.

A new study that examines the growth of galaxy clusters rather than the movement of stars independently confirms the presence of dark energy. Researchers, led by Alexey Vikhlinin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), found that dark energy seems to restrain the growth of clusters over time, hindering the gravitational clumping of matter that would allow them to grow even more massive.

Vikhlinin called the findings, which are set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, "an unambiguous signature of dark energy." Such an effect is not entirely surprising: Astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham in England raised this as a likely role for dark energy in a 2007 Scientific American article.

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At the same time, new theories my shed light on dark matter.