• jmward01 38 minutes ago

    My dark energy/expansion of the universe thought experiment is still this: when you throw a ball up in an expanding universe, how fast does it come back down? This is (clearly) not my field but this basic question just seems to lead fun places. No matter how I think about this question I always come back to the idea that matter seems special in an expanding universe since it seems to extract energy from nothing if the universe is expanding uniformly. As we learn more I hope to get a good explanation for this question one day.

    • swiftcoder 3 hours ago

      > They’re aiming for 50 million galaxies once the survey is complete... Sure, the DESI survey is less than 1% of all the galaxies in the observable volume of the cosmos

      That just broke my brain. Had to look it up. 2+ trillion galaxies in the observable universe? That puts things in perspective all right

      • omnicognate 2 hours ago

        Each one thousands to hundreds of thousands of light years across, and with millions of light years between them.

      • jgalt212 2 hours ago

        I wish there was a prediction market for dark energy: real or fudge factor.