Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales.
DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
In their new study, DESI researchers found that gravity behaves as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The result validates the leading model of the universe and limits possible theories of modified gravity, which have been proposed as alternative ways to explain unexpected observations—including the accelerating expansion of our universe that is typically attributed to dark energy.
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