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The universe is expanding, and that expansion is speeding up... which is the opposite of what we expected.
There are lots of different ideas about what could be causing the inexplicable acceleration of this expansion, and one commonly suspected culprit is something called dark energy. Though historically, we aren’t entirely sure what dark energy is either. But now, we might finally have an explanation.
Professor Claudia de Rham at Imperial College London suggests something pretty radical: that gravity has mass.
In Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravitons should be massless, but in de Rham’s proposal, the graviton has mass. And if gravitons have mass, then gravity is expected to have a weaker influence on very large distance scales, explaining why the expansion of the universe hasn’t been reined in.
Find out more about De Rham’s radical theory that could hold the key to why the universe is rapidly expanding and explain the nature of dark energy in this Elements.
Read More:
Did Scientists Finally Solve the Impossible Physics Riddle?
Massive gravity changes Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and it implies some truly wild stuff, like that gravity waves with mass would consequently have momentum.
Has physicist's gravity theory solved 'impossible' dark energy riddle?
"The work marks a breakthrough in a century-long quest to build a working theory of massive gravity. Despite successive efforts, previous versions of the theory had the unfortunate feature of predicting the instantaneous decay of every particle in the universe – an intractable issue that mathematicians refer to as a “ghost”.
Turning gravity upside down
“The beautiful thing about Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that the red flags are built in – we know that, at some point, it will stop working,” says De Rham. "It tells us exactly when it’s breaking down, and when new physics is needed. That doesn’t happen very often in science."
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