Scientists are hoping to understand one of the most enduring mysteries in cosmology by simulating its effect on the clustering of galaxies.
That mystery is dark energy – the phenomenon that scientists hypothesise is causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate. No-one knows anything about dark energy, except that it could be, somehow, blowing pretty much everything apart.
Meanwhile, dark energy has an equally shady cousin – dark matter. This invisible substance appears to have been clustering around galaxies, and preventing them from spinning themselves apart, by lending them an extra gravitational pull.
Such a clustering effect is in competition with dark energy’s accelerating expansion. Yet studying the precise nature of this competition might shed some light on dark energy. […]
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