Monday, May 14, 2018

Dark Energy Levels Not Too Constrained For Star Formation

I've always had a bit of a problem with the anthropic scenario of our universe, i.e. the idea that we are living in a universe JUST fined-tuned to allow us to exist. My problem isn't with the observations so far, but rather how much people are already thinking that this must be true, the data are set, and that we can run away with it. Certainly many people outside of cosmology have tried to spin this into whatever directions that they want.

So when news like this comes along, I just want to yell "I told you so!". It is not that I agree or disagree with the conclusion, but it is to point out that in our attempt to understand all of this, our knowledge is still in its infancy, and that we really don't know enough yet to be able to say things one way or the other on many of the big issues. We do have a fuzzy idea on what direction it is going, but in a number of things and observations, more is required to understand things even better.

The new studies ran the simulation on the star formation of our universe against the amount of dark energy in our universe. They can, to put it crudely, dial in various level of dark energy in their simulations. They found that there is a wider range than initially expected for our present universe to form, i.e. it is not in a very narrow range that was thought of. So keeping everything relatively the same, we could see this present universe that we're in for a large range of dark energy.

The simulations allowed the researchers to adjust the amount of dark energy in the universe and watch what happened.

The results were a surprise. The research revealed that the amount of dark energy could be increased a couple of hundred times – or reduced equally drastically – without substantially affecting anything else.

So for dark energy, the parameter is not as "fine tuned" as one expected.

Zz.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mnras/sty846/4963750?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mnras/sty879/4966995?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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