Early dark energy reconciles the different ‘thermometers’ of the Universe ⚡ экспресс
We measure the universe’s expansion rate in different ways, and the numbers don’t match. New data from JWST and DESI telescopes helped test the idea of ‘early dark energy’—a brief burst of energy right after the Big Bang. It turns out it almost eliminates the mismatch, like recalibrating your speedometer with two GPS signals. Is this finally the answer to the riddle?
For decades, two ways of measuring the speed at which galaxies fly apart gave conflicting numbers—like two thermometers in the same room with different readings. One relied on nearby stars, the other on the ancient light of the Big Bang. Adam Riess used supernovae to get a value of about 73, while the Planck satellite got 67 from the cosmic microwave background (in arbitrary units).
Astronomers added observations of early galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope and the DESI sound wave map, along with the hypothesis of a brief burst of dark energy at the dawn of time. It’s as if one of the thermometers got caught in a warm draft for a moment—its reading rose slightly, and the discrepancy almost disappeared.
Early dark energy is not the same force that accelerates the Universe today. It was a fleeting push of ‘antigravity’ that vanished before the first stars appeared. Its trace: the patterns of ancient light became slightly blurred (by a few percent), which smoothed out the dispute. Thus, the standard model of the cosmos got a fine-tuning, and the Expansion of the Universe is described without conflict.
🎯 In the brief moment when early dark energy was active, the Universe may have expanded more than it did in the billions of years that followed.