This thing is awesome and it's going to help solve big riddles about the universe. It's a 570 Megapixel highly specialized camera that's going to photograph evidence of something that cannot be photographed or seen, something thought to be a basic part of the fabric of our universe. A strange and shadowy thing called Dark Energy. Dark Energy may hold the key to explaining why the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate. In general, gravity would eventually cause the expansion to slow down, stop, and reverse in a "Big Crunch". But Dark Energy is thought to counter that effect and increase the rate of expansion.
Here's how cosmologists describe this crazy stuff:
"The nature of this dark energy is a matter of speculation. It is known to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity. Since it is not very dense — roughly 10^-29 grams per cubic centimeter — it is hard to imagine experiments to detect it in the laboratory. Dark energy can only have such a profound impact on the universe, making up 74% of universal density, because it uniformly fills otherwise empty space. The two leading models are quintessence and the cosmological constant. Both models include the common characteristic that dark energy must have negative pressure."
According to the latest data, Dark Energy is the largest single component of the universe by far, constituting almost three-quarters of everything. Physical matter, the stuff that we often assume IS the universe... that's 4%. All the matter everywhere. And most of THAT is intergalactic gas. Everything we know as "real": Rocks, air, steel, wood, glass, gold, crayons, stars, cuttlefish, skate keys, iPads, marshmallows, transmissions, our bodies...constututes just 0.4% of the universe! We are insignificant indeed. A full 96% of our cosmos is made of crazy mind-blowing dark components, Dark Energy and Dark Matter, so called because they cannot be seen in an ordinary way yet they vastly effect the parts we can see.
Learning about the nature of Dark Energy could very well answer one of the biggest questions of cosmology: how will the universe end? Three possible futures are shown in this graph. Data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory suggest that Dark Energy may be constant in the universe, and that would give us the center trace and we'd go on expanding forever and the universe would have no end. But we shall see.
Here's the text from the chart:
"This illustration shows three possible futures for the Universe, depending on the behavior of dark energy, by showing how the scale of the Universe may change with time. If dark energy is constant, as the new Chandra results suggest, the expansion should continue accelerating forever. If dark energy increases, the acceleration may happen so quickly that galaxies, stars, and eventually atoms will be torn apart, in the so-called Big Rip. Dark energy may also lead to a recollapse of the Universe, in the Big Crunch. The illustration also shows the early decelerating expansion of the Universe, followed by the accelerating phase that started about 6 billion years ago."
Amazing stuff. How will it all end? Yes, we want to know that. And this camera will help us to "see" Dark Energy and uncover it's dark secrets.
