The Day The Universe Froze: New Model For Dark Energy

ScienceDaily (May 11, 2009) — Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

The ultimate fate of the universe depends on the exact nature of dark energy. Depending on its properties, the universe may fly apart (the big rip) or the current expansion might reverse into contraction (the big crunch) or anything in between. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

A cosmological phase transition — similar to freezing — is one of the distinctive aspects of this latest effort to account for dark energy — the mysterious negative force that cosmologists now think makes up more than 70 percent of all the energy and matter in the universe and is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.