Paul Matthew Sutter, Ohio State – Dark Energy

Paul Matthew Sutter

Paul Matthew Sutter is becoming a regular fixture on the WAMC airwaves having previously offered a fascinating piece on cosmological nothingness and talking with Bob Barrett on The Best of Our Knowledge last week.

Today on The Academic Minute, Dr. Sutter, astronomer and physicist at Ohio State University, profiles dark energy.

Dr. Paul Matthew Sutter is the INFN Fellow in Theoretical Physics at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and Visiting Scholar at Ohio State University. Paul received his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Illinois in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. He now splits his time between Trieste, Italy, and Columbus, Ohio. He recently debuted his #AskaSpaceman podcast [AskASpaceman.com] and would love to hear from you with astronomy questions. Like him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter.

Dark Energy

Over a hundred years ago Edwin Hubble discovered that we live in an expanding universe: every galaxy is getting further away from every other galaxy.

Old news, right? Well about 15 years ago, astronomers were studying distant supernovae (you know, exploding stars) and discovered that they were too dim. The only conclusion they could reach was that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Maybe they were just wrong, but over the years we’ve made new measurement and tried different experiments. And all the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: not only are galaxies getting further away from each other, but they appear to be doing it faster and faster every day.

And we don’t know why!

We give a cool name to this observed phenomenon: “dark energy”. “Energy” because this effect kinda looks like something that’s pushing the universe apart, and “dark” because we don’t understand it.

What are the origins of dark energy? Is it some new field or force? How long has it been going on? What is the ultimate fate of the universe? Or maybe we’re totally off the mark – what if we just don’t understand how gravity really works at cosmological scales, and there’s some new theory right around the corner that can explain it all?

Wish I could tell you some answers. But despite studying dark energy for over 15 years, we’re still at the stage where we’re just trying to get an accurate measurement of its effects!

Over the next decade a slew a new missions will better pin down the properties of dark energy, and maybe then we’ll be able to shed some light on the situation