Mysterious 'Dark Energy' May Not Exist, Study Claims
The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate after all, meaning that mysterious "dark energy" might not actually exist, according to a new study. In 2011, three cosmologists from two research teams won the Nobel Prize in physics for independently showing that distant Type Ia supernovas, which are a kind of exploding star, are moving away from Earth faster than nearby ones are. This hypothetical dispersive force came to be known as dark energy, because astronomers didn't really know what it was (and still don't, as a matter of fact).
