A New Study Says We May Be Living in a Variable Universe

Understanding the universe and our place in it is the great journey of human science, and right now the best theory of... well... everything is a concept known as the Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) model. With observable matter only making up roughly 5 percent of the universe, this model represents dark energy (Λ) and cold dark matter (CDM), which together are believed to make up everything else. There’s just one problem—dark matter and dark energy are invisible, and only weakly interacts with gravity. So, in other words, there’s more than a few mysteries where dark matter and dark energy are concerned. And now, a new cosmological map developed by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is creating a few more. DESI—outfitted at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona—just commenced a five-year effort to make the most detailed map of the known universe, including 40 million galaxies stretched across 11 billion years. The first data release, just recently published online, is already showing that the cosmological model is pretty good, but can’t quite predict everything that the instrument is seeing. [View in Browser]( [Popular Mechanics]( [SHOP]( [EXCLUSIVE]( [SUBSCRIBE]( [A New Study Says We May Be Living in a Variable Universe]( [A New Study Says We May Be Living in a Variable Universe]( [A New Study Says We May Be Living in a Variable Universe]( Understanding the universe and our place in it is the great journey of human science, and right now the best theory of... well... everything is a concept known as the Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) model. With observable matter only making up roughly 5 percent of the universe, this model represents dark energy (Λ) and cold dark matter (CDM), which together are believed to make up everything else. There’s just one problem—dark matter and dark energy are invisible, and only weakly interacts with gravity. So, in other words, there’s more than a few mysteries where dark matter and dark energy are concerned. And now, a new cosmological map developed by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is creating a few more. DESI—outfitted at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona—just commenced a five-year effort to make the most detailed map of the known universe, including 40 million galaxies stretched across 11 billion years. The first data release, just recently published online, is already showing that the cosmological model is pretty good, but can’t quite predict everything that the instrument is seeing. Understanding the universe and our place in it is the great journey of human science, and right now the best theory of... well... everything is a concept known as the Lambda-CDM (ΛCDM) model. With observable matter only making up roughly 5 percent of the universe, this model represents dark energy (Λ) and cold dark matter (CDM), which together are believed to make up everything else. There’s just one problem—dark matter and dark energy are invisible, and only weakly interacts with gravity. So, in other words, there’s more than a few mysteries where dark matter and dark energy are concerned. And now, a new cosmological map developed by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is creating a few more. DESI—outfitted at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona—just commenced a five-year effort to make the most detailed map of the known universe, including 40 million galaxies stretched across 11 billion years. The first data release, just recently published online, is already showing that the cosmological model is pretty good, but can’t quite predict everything that the instrument is seeing. 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