SOMETHING in the Universe is speeding up its expansion and pushing the galaxies apart. But it wasn’t always that way, according to a group of British physicists. They’re suggesting that the accelerator may only have been pressed relatively recently, when the Universe was a few billion years old. If they’re right, there’s no reason why this mysterious repulsive force, dubbed “dark energy”, couldn’t change again or even switch off completely—meaning all bets about the future of the Universe are off.
The team, from the University of Portsmouth and Oxford University, studied a range of cosmological data sets, including observations…
