Dark Energy Poem by gershon hepner

Dark energy has stunted growth
of galaxies for many billion years.
Could it be this that’s me loath
to burst forth and expand my own frontiers,
remaining in my shell, a turtle
whose stunting carapace is made of en-
ergy that’s dark, the hurdle
I can’t surmount, confined within my pen?

Perhaps, but I don’t use a pen
to get outside the galaxy where I’m
confined within my mise-en-scène,
a cyberworld beyond all space and time.
I use the program that’s called Word,
and with dark energy expand beyond
the galaxy that’s called Absurd,
who energy is that of which I’m darkly fond.

Inspired by an article by Dennis Overbye, who explains in the NYT on December 16,2008 that dark energy is stunting the growth of objects within the universe:
The same mystery force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, astronomers said on Tuesday. After bulking up rapidly in the first 10 billion years of cosmic time, clusters of galaxies, the cloudlike swarms that are the largest conglomerations of matter in the universe, have grown anemically or not at all during the last five billion years, like sullen teenagers who suddenly refuse to eat.“This result could be explained as arrested development of the universe, ” said Alexey Vikhlinin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led a multinational team using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to weigh galaxy clusters from far across space. The group reported the results in two papers that will appear in the Astrophysical Journal. The culprit, he said, appears to be an antigravitational force that astronomers have labeled “dark energy.” It was discovered 10 years ago by astronomers who were using exploding stars called supernovas as distance markers to chart the expansion of the universe. In a puzzle that is still reverberating, they found that instead of slowing down because of cosmic gravity, as common sense would suggest, the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, with galaxies zooming apart faster and faster. Dr. Vikhlinin’s results dovetail eerily with the supernova results, suggesting that dark energy emerged as a dominant force in the universe about seven billion to five billion years ago. Clusters grow by gravity, according to cosmological theory, starting as small dimples in the heat and fizz of the Big Bang and then drawing in surrounding material over the eons. Dark energy would work against gravity and try to push the matter falling in back out, stalling growth.


12/16/08