Three years ago, observations of distant, exploding stars blew to smithereens some of astronomers’ most cherished ideas about the universe. To piece together an updated theory, they’re now thinking dark thoughts about what sort of mystery force may be contorting the cosmos.
Observations of distant supernova, including 1997ff, suggest that over the past few billion years, a mysterious substance called dark energy has caused gravity, at its largest scale,
to become repulsive.
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