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PBS Space Time
What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?
Season 8
Episode 24
What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding - there’s some kind of anti-gravitational effect that’s causing the expansion to accelerate. We don’t know what it is - just that it competes against the inward-pulling effect of gravity. We call this mysterious influence dark energy. But, what is dark energy, really?
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15:35
What do you get if you combine something that’s infinitely massive and negative infinitely massive?
16:35
Is there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space?
11:43
Gravitational tsunamis exist and we’re on the verge of being able to detect them.
18:40
Will we ever become a Kardeshev Type-1 civilization and how can we get there?
14:05
New data is telling us that Neutron stars may make one of the most popular dark matter candidates.
16:08
Here’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe.
17:44
We’ve never seen a TDE in the Milky Way, but we’ve seen them in distant galaxies.
16:51
Let’s talk about quantum gravity experiments that can be done here on Earth!
19:25
What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy?