According to this newspaper article:
THE Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy, first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder", appears to have been fuelling the expansion of the universe for most of its history.This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said yesterday.
"This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute.
He and several colleagues used the Hubble to observe 23 supernovas.
Because the physics of supernova explosions is extremely well-known, it is possible for the astronomers to gauge not just their distance, but how fast the universe was expanding at the time they went off.
The idea of dark energy was first proposed by Einstein as a means of explaining how the universe could resist collapsing under the pull of gravity.
OK, when are you cosmologists going to admit that you're just making it up as you go along? Whatever happened to phlogiston and luminiferous aether? I think that this latest theory is incorrect. I believe that there are actually four different types of dark matter - dark matter, super dark matter, super-duper dark matter, and quasi-super-duper dark matter. These matters have unknown individual properties. However the net result of their acting together is to create a universe which appears exactly as it does today. And why does the universe appear exactly as it does today? Because of the interaction of the forces I have posited. QED.
The Skeptic's Field Guide by Theo Clark and Jef Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.