A team of MIT physicists has put forward a bold hypothesis that the discrepancy in measurements of the expansion rate of the universe is due to a mysterious force called early dark energy, the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) reports.
Scientists have suggested that early dark energy could have emerged in the first moments after the Big Bang, which could have influenced the expansion of the newborn universe. According to the researchers, this helped resolve the so-called Hubble tension – a discrepancy in estimates of the expansion rate of the universe measured by different methods.
In early September, an international team of scientists from Italy, Greece, India and China modeled the possible appearance of the Universe before the Big Bang. The study was published in the scientific journal Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). In their work, the specialists relied on the non-classical model of “rebounding” cosmology, according to which the Universe constantly goes through phases of expansion and contraction.
