What if dark energy , which according to astrophysicists represents almost 75% of the entire universe , did not exist? It is the proposal launched by the American mathematicians Joel Smoller and Blake Temple in the latest issue of PNAS magazine.
A few years ago astronomers thought that after the great outbreak of the Big Bang , the universe must be slowing down. However, the study of distant supernovae revealed that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate . To explain this mysterious acceleration they introduced the concept of dark energy .
Astrophysicists have worked with this hypothesis for the past decade, but this could be about to change. Temple and Smoller have just developed a model based on Einstein's equations that explains the anomalous acceleration of the universe without resorting to dark energy or the cosmological constant (initially introduced by Einstein in his field equations of General Relativity). According to the new theory, the universe would spread out in waves , which would explain the acceleration of galaxies.
