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Our universe is an astonishing and perplexing place. Dark energy and dark matter are two hypothetical concepts that will determine whether the cosmos will expand into oblivion or contract into a single point. Here's how it works.

About 20 billion years ago everything we can observe today was contained in a "singularity". This singularity is difficult to imagine; it is a concentration of energy and matter that occupies no space.

Many scientists believe that a "Big Bang" occurred -an explosion that created all that makes up the universe today. Astronomy has confirmed the existence of other "solar systems" like the one that exists today with planets circling a sun; of other galaxies, that is, clusters of stars like our milky way, and even clusters of galaxies. Mind bending stuff!

Scientists have also discovered that all galaxies are traveling away from each other at an accelerating rate. What phenomenon explains this finding? Measuring all the sources of known energy, there just doesn't seem enough to explain what is driving our galaxies away from each other.

Thus, scientists have to hypothesize that there is a form of energy which is not measurable by our existing technology which is causing this accelerating expansion, which they have dubbed "Dark Energy". They believe that it permeates the universe but in such small density that our scientific methods have so far been unable to measure it. Nevertheless, this energy predicts that our universe will continue to fly apart into infinity.

To complete the story of our universe, scientists also hypothesize the existence of "dark matter". This mass works in an opposite effect to dark energy, in that it creates gravity that might eventually stop the expansion of the universe and attract it back toward a singularity. Again, our scientific instruments are too crude to detect this dark matter.

So ultimately we can't say whether the universe will continue to fly apart, or contract to this incredible single point. The only thing we can be assured of is that these two theories will not happen in our life time. Whew!

Learn more about this author, Lorne Yacuk.
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