Explanation: Eight years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself.
Such claims were not usually popular with astronomers, though, because lambda is so unlike known universe components, because lambda's value appeared limited by other observations, and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda had previously done well in explaining the data.
What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations.
Over the past eight years, independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the unsettling result.
The above picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations.
