Is Dark Energy Just an Illusion? Neutron Stars Will Tell Us

upstart writes:

Is Dark Energy Just an Illusion? Neutron Stars Will Tell Us:

For about 100 years now, general relativity has been very successful at describing gravity on a variety of regimes, passing all experimental tests on Earth and the solar system. However, to explain cosmological observations such as the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe, we need to introduce dark components, such as dark matter and dark energy, which still remain a mystery.

Enrico Barausse, astrophysicist at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) and principal investigator of the ERC grant GRAMS (GRavity from Astrophysical to Microscopic Scales) questions whether dark energy is real or, instead, it may be interpreted as a breakdown of our understanding of gravity. The existence of dark energy could be just an illusion," he says, the accelerated expansion of the Universe might be caused by some yet unknown modifications of general relativity, a sort of dark gravity'."

The merger of neutron stars offers a unique situation to test this hypothesis because gravity around them is pushed to the extreme. Neutron stars are the densest stars that exist, typically only 10 kilometers in radius, but with a mass between one or two times the mass of our Sun," explains the scientist. This makes gravity and the spacetime around them extreme, allowing for abundant production of gravitational waves when two of them collide. We can use the data acquired during such events to study the workings of gravity and test Einstein's theory in a new window."

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