SHEDDING LIGHT ON PHANTOM ENERGY AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE
We live in an age of precision cosmology. As we continue to observe and study the universe around us using ever more precise instruments and increasingly sophisticated data- processing systems, the findings have invariably proven to be unexpected – if not frankly bizarre. Perhaps the most famous of these findings was the gradual realisation that everything we can see in the universe – every dust cloud, asteroid field, planet, star, nebula and galaxy cluster – simply doesn’t have sufficient mass to ensure that the universe behaves in the way it clearly does – at least according to the standard model of cosmology, grounded in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
A potential solution to this problem was first suggested as far back as the early 1930s with dark matter, so called because it must consist of a material that neither emits nor reacts with visible light – or indeed any part of the electromagnetic spectrum. And so the dark side of the universe was born.
More recently – albeit indirectly by detecting its gravitational influence – astronomers have learned more about dark matter, not least the astounding fact that it must make up around 23 per cent of the total mass in the universe. Nevertheless,
