Distant black holes chart universe's dark energy history By
looking at bright, outlying black holes, scientists are able to
study the patterns that dark energy has followed, going as far
back as 10 billion years. Wed, Nov 14 2012 at 4:40 PM Extremely
bright black holes gobbling up matter in the distant universe
have provided a window back in time for astronomers to study
dark energy more than 10 billion years ago. Dark energy is the
mysterious force thought to be pulling everything in the
universe apart, causing space-time to expand and galaxies to
move farther and farther away from each other, all at an
accelerating clip. Dark energy, whatever it is, currently
appears to be beating out the attractive of force of gravity
that works to pull galaxies and everything in the universe
closer together. However, that wasn't always the case. When the
universe was young, astronomers think dark energy's impact was
small, and gravity won out. To confirm this idea and learn about
when gravity lost the fight to dark energy