Dark energy, the mysterious substance thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, almost certainly exists despite some astronomers' doubts, a new study says.
After a two-year study, an international team of researchers concludes that the probability of
dark energy
being real stands at 99.996 percent. But the scientists still don't know what the stuff is.
"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn’t surprising that so many researchers question its existence," co-author Bob Nichol, of the University of Portsmouth in England, said in a statement. "But with our new work we’re more confident than ever that this
exotic component of the universe
is real — even if we still have no idea what it consists of."
Did you know there are only 5000 Snow Leopards in the wild now and they are confined to Central Asia? However, the effective global population (those likely to reproduce) is less than half that number.