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A number of observations confirming discoveries of distant supernovae have contributed to the work of the High Redshift (High-Z) Supernova Search. These bright stellar explosions are astronomers' best "standard candle" for measuring the distances to the farthest galaxies. Much to the surprise of the search team, the distances to the supernovae have been greater than those predicted by the Big Bang. It seems that the universe is expanding faster now than it did in the past, hence it is accelerating in its expansion. This has lead to a theory of a "dark energy" much like the "dark matter" of which the MACHOs form a part. The dark energy is a repulsive force that acted during the initial inflation of the universe when it expanded from the size of a proton to the size of a basketball in the first 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang (if it had started as the size of a pea it would have expanded to about the size of Saturn's orbit, 877 million miles, in that time!). The density of matter with its mutual gravitational attraction has kept this repulsive force in check for over ten billion years, but it has begun asserting itself again as matter is spread more and more thinly through space by the continuing expansion of the cosmos. | |
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