Tag: dark energy
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Could gravity have mass?
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Might gravity have mass? From Physics World: When confronted with something unexplained in the data, scientists face several possibilities. Maybe there’s an error and the result is spurious. Maybe…
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Using Black Holes to Measure Dark Energy, Like a BOSS
Far from being invisible, black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the Universe. The black holes themselves aren’t emitting light, but the matter they draw in heats up and much of it shoots back out in powerful jets. When that happens, the black hole is known as a quasar, and it can…
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My dysfunctional relationship with dark energy
“Dark energy” is one of the more unfortunate names in science. You’d think it has something to do with dark matter (itself a misnomer), but it has the opposite effect: while dark matter drives the clumping-up of material that makes galaxies, dark energy pushes the expansion of the Universe to greater and greater rates. Though…
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Tracking dark energy using galaxy clusters
I write articles and posts on a lot of different topics, both for my own blog and at Ars Technica. Many of those subjects drift pretty far from my putative area of expertise, but occasionally I get to write about something I know pretty well. To wit: last week, a group of researchers using the…
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The Dark Energy Camera takes its first images
I had the privilege of visiting Fermilab in May, as part of my research for my book-in-progress. While I was there, I got to see the test rig for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which looks like something from Stargate or the wormhole entrance from Contact. Unfortunately for me, the camera itself had already been…
Bowler Hat Science 