The key to unlocking DARK ENERGY

There’s an often-overlooked number that cosmologists believe holds the key to unlocking some of the deepest mysteries in the Universe. According to Richard Feynman: “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.” Equal to approximately 1/137, it’s called the ‘fine structure constant’ and it describes the way light interacts with atoms. Except, according to new research, it might not be so constant after all. That in turn could help us to explain why the expansion of the Universe appears to be speeding up, and to predict the ultimate fate of the cosmos.

It was 1998 when our understanding of the Universe began to turn upside down. The cosmos has been expanding since its creation in the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Most astronomers assumed that this expansion was slowing down as the energy from that initial event petered out. Except new measurements using distant exploding stars called supernovae showed the opposite to be true. Over the last