Cosmic Architecture: Mapping the Universe’s Design, Part 1 of 2

We now know the universe is laced with vast formations – galaxies, superclusters, walls of stars spanning hundreds of millions of light-years, and enormous voids still waiting for explanation. Some estimates propose that between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies may exist across the cosmos. Dr. Jason Rhodes from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes the universe using a pie chart. “You can see that the contents of the universe are divided up into very uneven pieces. But all the stuff I’ve talked about is what we call ‘normal matter.’ It’s the stuff we can see in the universe, it’s the stuff we can detect, it’s the stuff that we see with telescopes and our eyes, it’s you and me. That only makes up about 5% of the universe. And we’ve known for the better part of a century now that most of the matter in the universe is ‘dark matter.’” “If you don't have dark matter, those spots never get clumpy enough. It turns out, you need at least a million times the mass of the Sun in one dense region, before you can start forming stars.”

In 1998, astronomers were stunned to discover that the universe’s expansion was speeding up. The mysterious force driving this acceleration is what we now call dark energy. In about 100 billion years, this expansion will have carried all galaxies outside of our local group beyond our cosmic horizon.

Science has no answers so far. But in 2023, astronomers made a striking discovery: dark energy appears to be linked to black holes. “The team of astronomers at the University of Hawaii working in collaboration with astronomers across the UK and other countries have found a connection between dark energy and black holes. And that this dark energy and the black holes are closely coupled to the expansion of the universe.”