This is the theory of the cosmological constant
4.4.2001
From: New York Times
Photographing the explosion of a distant star has given astronomers the first direct evidence of the existence of "negative gravity" in the universe. This is what scientists announced at the NASA conference, which took place on Monday in Washington. In 1997, the Hubble Space Telescope randomly photographed the explosion of a star, considered the most distant ever observed. Scientists say that tracking the relative intensity of the light from the exploded star confirms one of Einstein's hypotheses about the universe.
This hypothesis states that there is an invisible form of energy in space, which creates a mutual repulsion between objects that are normally attracted to each other by gravity.
Einstein himself believed that the force - called the "cosmological constant size" - was so strange that at a later time he changed his mind and denied its existence. However, already in 1988, even before the shooting of the star explosion in 1997, Einstein's hypothesis received theoretical support, when research findings on the subject testified that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the force accelerating the expansion is negative gravity. From the discovery of the "cosmological constant size" it appears that it has increased considerably in the last billions of years and that the relationship between it and the gravitational force known to science has been reversed.
The new findings confirm a crucial part of the theory and dismiss some of the competing theories on the subject. The findings show that the amount of negative gravity at any given value is minimal and that its effects are not felt in everyday life. But, at vast distances involving giant bodies in space, the constant size effect is so powerful that it pushes groups of galaxies apart.
Exploding stars, such as the one unexpectedly discovered in the Hubble telescope image, may form an excellent basis for the study of this type of forces operating in the universe. Now the scientists are back and focusing on a research observation of a star that exploded 11 billion years ago - a time when the universe was about a quarter of its current size and the strength of gravity exceeded that of the cosmological constant size.
