Neutrinos may have sparked off mysterious dark energy

Washington, December 29 (ANI): A team of theoretical physicists has suggested that the mysterious force known as dark energy, which is causing our universe to expand at a faster and faster rate, might have been created by neutrinos.

Dark energy, an unknown force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, is the leading cosmological mystery of modern-day science.

It was discovered in 1998 after astrophysicists noted that supernovae - the exploded remains of massive stars - showed an accelerated rate of expansion in the last 2 billion years or so when compared to older epochs.xplanations for dark energy fall into two basic camps: those theories that add a new physical entity or those that change the laws of gravity, according to Eric Linder with the University of California at Berkeley.

"If you search for 'dark energy' in just the titles (of research papers) in the past year, you will find 200 speculations on what dark energy is," Linder said.

"There are a great many hypotheses for dark energy. Some ties to neutrinos have been considered for the last several years, but nothing substantial has yet come out of them," he added.

The idea for neutrinos triggering dark energy sprang from calculations showing that the density of dark energy is comparable to the value of neutrino mass, lead researcher Jitesh Bhatt, with the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, told Discovery News.

Researchers suggest that dark energy was created from neutrino condensate in the split second after the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago.

"It will take much more work before we can pin down the nature of dark energy," Bhatt said. "Without knowing the nature of the dark energy, our knowledge of theoretical physics would remain incomplete," he added. (ANI)