NASA and DoE Team On Dark Energy Research 106
Roland Piquepaille writes "NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy have teamed up to operate the future Joint Dark Energy Mission. As you probably know, recent astronomical measurements have showed that about 72% of the total energy in the universe is dark energy, even if scientists don't know much about it, but speculate that it is present almost since the beginning of our Universe more than 13 billion years ago. The JDEM 'mission will make precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe to understand how this rate has changed with time. These measurements will yield vital clues about the nature of dark energy.' The launch of a spacecraft for the JDEM mission is not planned before 2015."
Re:The realm of the DoE (Score:4, Informative)
Actually DOE has always been deeply involved [doe.gov] in high energy (particle physics) research. They fund a number of accelerators, including Fermilab. Its not clear that any of that research would lead to usable energy sources either.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Re:It's a silly thing to measure. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course being a couch-scientist (worse than amateur scientist), I might be hugely wrong, but somehow, I don't think I am (surprisingly).
Unfortunately, you are wrong, and I guess it's not that surprising, considering your ... interesting take on cosmology. Einstein's work was intimately concerned with the nature of spacetime, so saying that "he looked soley[sic] at matter" is flat-out wrong.
Space and matter are the same? Then either space has a gravitational effect, or they're the "same" in a way that doesn't include a fundamental property of matter, which is to say that they're not the same at all (you'll recognise the quote "in exactly the same way that bricks don't" -- it speaks to nature of classification rather elegantly I think).
So why hasn't the gravitational effect of space been detected? Oh, wait, because the scientists missed something. Silly scientists!
Re:what i don't get is... (Score:4, Informative)
According to the current theory, dark energy does exist in our solar system, its just that you need many, many more than only 9 decimal places to measure it.
Its repulsive effect however increases with scale, so the larger distances you probe, the easier it is detect.
Re:Dark Matter/Emergy Does Not Exist (Score:3, Informative)
It only took a few minutes of googling to come up with this paper [arxiv.org].
Note that "this paper" has not yet been refereed and accepted by a journal. It is conventional, when submitting papers to arxiv, to indicate to what journal the paper has been submitted, whether it has been refereed and accepted or not. There is none of that information here. Normally a paper submitted in March 2008 would have been accepted and published by end of Nov 2008 if it had been. I suspect that it has been rejected.
Re:The realm of the DoE (Score:4, Informative)
Actually DOE has always been deeply involved in high energy (particle physics) research. They fund a number of accelerators, including Fermilab. Its not clear that any of that research would lead to usable energy sources either.
Good so far.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Yes, but don't forget that DOE has its own cosmologists, too. The DOE end of JDEM is being handled by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has quite a bit of stuff [lbl.gov] going on in cosmology, mostly under its physics [lbl.gov] division.
(I [lbl.gov] do some work with one of the collaborations [lbl.gov] based there.)
Re:what i don't get is... (Score:3, Informative)
Dark matter doesn't have anti-gravity effects. The whole reason why it was postulated in the first place was because of its positive gravity effects: to explain the "missing mass" contributing to galactic rotation curves.
It doesn't exactly have "anti-" light effects. The main working theory is just that it doesn't interact with light (electromagnetic radiation), because it's not electrically charged.
Re:Dark Matter/Emergy Does Not Exist (Score:1, Informative)
I think you're confused. It wasn't Einstein that debunked the ether theory, it was Michealson and Morley in 1887:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaelson-Morley_experiment [wikipedia.org]
More research, less blather, please.