The universe’s expansion is accelerating, not decelerating. Our understanding of how the universe works may need an update.

Not everything we knew about the universe is wrong. But not not everything. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) ...

The assumption of constant dark energy is baked into the widely accepted Lambda-CDM model of the universe. In this model, only 5% of the universe is made up of the ordinary matter we can see.

The first ideas for the nature of dark matter focused on solving the theoretical problems of the Standard Model, which describes not just the known particles but the quantum forces ...

Although the evidence still falls short of physicists’ benchmark for a “discovery,” experts say the new result leaves the standard model in dire straits. Making sense of an evolving dark ...

Science's best understanding of how the universe works, which is called the standard cosmological model, refers to dark energy as being constant—meaning it does not change. The idea was first ...

Recent DESI observations further complicated the picture. According to the Standard Model of elementary particles, if dark energy were simply a vacuum energy, its density should remain constant ...

New data further challenge the best scientific theory of the history and the structure of the universe. But a separate recent result reinforces it. Using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument ...

Scientists are homing in on the nature of a mysterious force called dark energy, and nothing short of the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. The force is enormous — it makes up nearly 70 ...