{"id":25740,"date":"2016-05-14T12:48:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T19:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/the-existence-of-massive-particles-of-light-could-finally-explain-dark-energy"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:59:41","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:59:41","slug":"the-existence-of-massive-particles-of-light-could-finally-explain-dark-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/the-existence-of-massive-particles-of-light-could-finally-explain-dark-energy","title":{"rendered":"The existence of massive particles of light could finally explain dark energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-existence-of-massive-particles-of-light-could-finally-explain-dark-energy.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered something mysterious pushing galaxies apart faster than gravity pulls them together. It seemed like every little bit of space had some amount of energy that spread it away from every other little bit of space, and that strange pushing came to be known as \u2018dark energy\u2019 \u2014 dark, because no one knows what it is.<\/p>\n<p>And now a group of physicists <a href=\"http:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prd\/abstract\/10.1103\/PhysRevD.93.083012\">have shown<\/a> that dark energy could probably be explained \u2014 as long as we\u2019re willing to give up a fundamental piece of our understanding of light\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Most scientists think that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/the-universe-is-expanding-faster-than-the-laws-of-physics-can-explain\">dark energy exists<\/a> because of what\u2019s known as a cosmological constant \u2014 something acting throughout the Universe that tells different bits of space to repel each other. It\u2019s sort of like an anti-gravity force, but it acts everywhere instead of just being between two things with mass and it always acts with the same strength.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/heavy-light-could-explain-dark-energy\">http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/heavy-light-could-explain-dark-energy<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered something mysterious pushing galaxies apart faster than gravity pulls them together. It seemed like every little bit of space had some amount of energy that spread it away from every other little bit of space, and that strange pushing came to be known as \u2018dark energy\u2019 \u2014 dark, because [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25740"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67495,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25740\/revisions\/67495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}