There might not be a mysterious 'dark' force accelerating the expansion of the Universe after all. The truth could be much stranger – bubbles of space where time passes at drastically different ...

Of this enormous slice of the universe's matter and energy budget, dark energy — the placeholder name for the force causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate — accounts for around 70%.

A diagram representing the Keenan–Barger–Cowie supervoid amid the cosmic web of matter that spans the universe. The Milky Way is located off-center of the void.

The new model forgoes the need for either dark matter or dark energy as explanations for the universe's acceleration and how structures like galaxies are generated. The researcher's work builds on ...

New hints from one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos to date suggest that mysterious dark energy may be evolving in ways that could shift how astronomers understand the universe. Dark ...