The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

By Phil Wiseman, Ernest Rutherford Fellow, University of Southampton
Mark Sullivan, Professor, University of Southampton

A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism.

Scientists had long known that the universe was expanding. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered that this expansion was accelerating. Astrophysicists concluded that something must be driving the acceleration. They named this unknown quantity “dark energy”.

The…

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