Astronomer Brad Schaefer of Louisiana State University, a maverick who unmasked the scientific inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and calculated the time of Jesus' crucifixion, is stirring things up again. He now suggests that the universe's expansion may have been fundamentally different in its earliest years from the way it is today, a finding that would rock astrophysics if confirmed.
His work builds on research first published in 1998, when two teams deduced that the growth of the universe is speeding up. Cosmologists now attribute this acceleration to dark energy, an undetected force that stretches space apart. To verify dark energy and understand how it works, scientists are trying to peer ever farther out in space and back in time. Schaefer realized that only a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful type of explosion ever observed, is bright enough to give us information about conditions near the edge of the visible universe, ...
