What is Dark Energy?
Posted
by Sabine Hossenfelder at 11:58 AM Labels: Astrophysics, Cosmology, Physics, Video
What’s
the difference between dark energy and dark matter? What does dark energy have
to do with the cosmological constant and is the cosmological constant really
the worst prediction ever?
First things first, what is dark energy? Dark energy is what causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. It’s not only that astrophysicists think the universe expands, but that the expansion is actually getting faster. And, here’s the important thing, matter alone cannot do that. If there was only matter in the universe, the expansion would slow down. To make the expansion of the universe accelerate, it takes negative pressure, and neither normal matter nor dark matter has negative pressure – but dark energy has it.
We do not actually know that dark energy is really made of anything, so interpreting this pressure in the normal way as by particles bumping into each other may be misleading. This negative pressure is really just something that we write down mathematically and that fits to the observations. It is similarly misleading to call dark energy “dark”, because “dark” suggests that it swallows light like, say, black holes do. But neither dark matter nor dark energy is actually dark in this sense. Instead, light just passes through them, so they are really transparent and not dark.
What’s the difference between dark energy and dark matter? Dark energy is what makes the universe expand, dark matter is what makes galaxies rotate faster. Dark matter does not have the funny negative pressure that is characteristic of dark energy. Really the two things are different and have different effects. There are of course some physicists speculating that dark energy and dark matter might have a common origin, but we don’t know whether that really is the case.
What does dark energy have to do with the cosmological constant? The cosmological constant is the simplest type of dark energy. As the name says, it’s really just a constant, it doesn’t change in time. Most importantly this means that it doesn’t change when the universe expands. This sounds innocent, but it is a really weird property. Think about this for a moment. If you have any kind of matter or radiation in some volume of space and that volume expands, then the density of the energy and pressure will decrease just because the stuff dilutes. But dark energy doesn’t dilute! It just remains constant.
Doesn’t this violate energy conservation? I get this question a lot. The answer is yes, and no. Yes, it does violate energy conservation in the way that we normally use the term. That’s because if the volume of space increases but the density of dark energy remains constant, then it seems that there is more energy in that volume. But energy just is not a conserved quantity in general relativity, if the volume of space can change with time. So, no, it does not violate energy conservation because in general relativity we have to use a different conservation law, that is the local conservation of all kinds of energy densities. And this conservation law is fulfilled even by dark energy. So the mathematics is all fine, don’t worry.
The cosmological constant was famously already introduced by Einstein and then discarded again. But astrophysicists think today that is necessary to explain observations, and it has a small, positive value. But I often hear physicists claiming that if you try to calculate the value of the cosmological constant, then the result is 120 orders of magnitude larger than what we observe. This, so the story has it, is the supposedly worst prediction ever.
Trouble is, that’s not true! It just isn’t a prediction. If it was a prediction, I ask you, what theory was ruled out by it being so terribly wrong? None, of course. The reason is that this constant which you can calculate – the one that is 120 orders of magnitude too large – is not observable. It doesn’t correspond to anything we can measure. The actually measureable cosmological constant is a free parameter of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that cannot be calculated by the theories we currently have.
Dark energy now is a generalization of the cosmological constant. This generalization allows that the energy density and pressure of dark energy can change with time and maybe also with space. In this case, dark energy is really some kind of field that fills the whole universe.
What observations speak for dark energy? Dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant is one of the parameters in the concordance model of cosmology. This model is also sometimes called ΛCDM. The Λ (Lambda) in this name is the cosmological constant and CDM stands for cold dark matter.
The cosmological constant in this model is not extracted from one observation in particular, but from a combination of observations. Notably that is the distribution of matter in the universe, the properties of the cosmic microwave background, and supernovae redshifts. Dark energy is necessary to make the concordance model fit to the data.
At least that’s what most physicists say. But some of them are claiming that really the data has been wrongly analyzed and the expansion of the universe doesn’t speed up after all. Isn’t science fun? If I come around to do it, I’ll tell you something about this new paper next week, so stay tuned.