‘Universe will continue to expand, become wasteland’

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The universe will continue to expand forever and eventually become a “cold, dead wasteland”, according to an Indian-origin cosmologist-led study that sheds light on mysterious “dark energy”.

Priya Natarajan of Yale University and astronomers at Nasa used the Hubble Space Telescope’s “galactic magnifying lens” to “narrow in” on what they believe comprises the “dark energy” that pushes universe apart at ever-increasing speed.
They concluded the distribution of dark energy — that is invisible and makes up a “large chunk of our universe”, or 72 per cent of its size — would mean the universe would never stop growing, the Science journal reported. The study predicted that the universe would eventually become a dead and cold wasteland.
In their study, the scientists observed how light from distant stars became distorted around a nearby cluster of galaxies called Abell 1689. The galaxies, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters that are known to science.
“We have to tackle the dark energy problem from all sides. It’s important to have several methods, and now we’ve got a new, very powerful one. What I like about our new method is that it’s very visual. You can literally see gravitation and dark energy bend the images of the background galaxies into arcs,” said Prof. Eric Jullo of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. —PTI