cosmology

Everything most people know about makes up a tiny fraction of the universe. Normal matter, the atoms and molecules we are used to, make up the tiniest fraction of the universe. In fact it makes up only around 5% of the universe. The rest of the universe is made up, hypothetically, of "dark matter" and "dark energy."

Awhile back I wrote about the best evidence we have ever had that the hypothetical "dark matter," originally conceived of to balance equations that otherwise couldn't explain the behavior of the universe, actually existed. But this discovery of evidence that "dark matter" is real still left about 70% of the universe merely hypothesized. Regular matter and dark matter only make up about 30% of the universe. The rest is a poorly understood thing called "dark energy" that was originally conceived of to explain the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Before, when people thought the expansion of the universe was either constant or slowing, normal matter and dark matter were all they needed to understand what was going on. But the discovery that the universe is flying apart at an ever faster rate meant SOMETHING else was out there causing the acceleration and dark energy was the hypothetical explanation.

Well, scientists may just have discovered evidence for dark energy. Scientists have discovered a giant, enormous, humongous nothingness in space. Now many people may think that space is full of nothingness, but it isn't. It is, among other things thinly spread out, filled with microwaves. Literally. Those microwaves are left over from the big bang. But now there is a huge hole discovered in the microwave background, or at least in our ability to detect it.