Space is a goo. Or, at least, in theory.
The current consensus suggests that most of the vast nothingness between stuff in space is made up of dark matter and dark energy. A new paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, first noticed by Live Science, suggests that the invisible forces that fill the universe might be a viscous fluid.
Every new bit of information about space further repels me from it.
Muhammad Ghulam Khuwajah Khan, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology in Jodhpur, proposes that space isn’t some big empty, well, space, but more like a thick, slow-moving fluid. I’m imagining the river of pink slime from Ghostbusters 2. Or, better yet, imagine a universe filled with honey. In Khan’s model, space has a viscosity, and it can stretch that allows it to carry vibrations that Khan calls “spatial phonons,” which are essentially tension waves moving through the fabric of the universe.
Khan’s idea is meant to fill in a hole in our understanding of the framework of the universe, a framework that has a name: the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. The model assumes that dark energy is constant, which is represented by the word lambda, and is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. But recent observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument in Arizona and the Dark Energy Survey in Chile suggest that dark energy might be weakening over time, which contradicts the model’s prediction.
Khan’s idea fills the gap, and it fills it with goo. But Khan is essentially proposing that dark energy is still driving the expansion of the universe, but these so-called spatial phonons give it an ever-so-gentle push back, resulting in an expansion that isn’t uniform. When you factor this theoretical resistance into the math, all of the discrepancies in recent surveys start to make sense.
It’s an appealing theory. It doesn’t throw away previous theories like the Big Bang or the as-yet-unobserved dark energy/matter. It keeps all those ideas intact while adding a little bit of goopy glue between them to help explain the weirdness of it all.
Of course, this is theoretical physics at its most speculative. It’s a fun idea, but one that could be obliterated with a single study from some other research team. But for now, find a little joy in the idea that the universe might be filled with the space equivalent of molasses.
The post Space Is Full of Goo. According to One Theory, at Least. appeared first on VICE.
