The discovery, recently published in Nature Astronomy, with a News & Views article written by a world expert on cosmology, found that the nature of dark energy may not be the cosmological constant introduced by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, which is crucial for its study.

A team within the SDSS-III (BOSS) collaboration led by Prof. Zhao Gongbo of National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) found evidence of dynamical dark energy at a significance level of 3.5 sigma. This suggests that the nature of dark energy may not be the vacuum energy, but some kind of dynamical field, especially for the quintom model whose EoS varies with time and crosses the -1 boundary during evolution, according to NAOC.

"As the Zhao team reported in this work, a dynamical dark energy model is able to naturally reconcile tensions between local and primordial measurements of cosmological parameters in the LCDM model," Prof. Zhang Xinmin at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) told Xinhua.

"Which makes a crucial step towards understanding the nature of dark energy," he added.

The new study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), CAS, and a Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship.

Source: Xinhua