Reasons to Believe

SDSS Measurements Confirm Existence of Dark Energy

Your child lies on the couch acting unusually calm. You touch his or her forehead and it feels warm. The instant thermometer gives a reading of 101.2°F from the child’s ear. The traditional thermometer in the mouth reads 101.4°F. Without question, your child has a fever.

Taken alone, any of the four techniques used to test for fever leads most parents to the proper conclusion that the child is ill. However, with each subsequent measurement, the strength of the parent’s conviction in the conclusion grows. Similarly, scientists will often draw the correct conclusions from one measurement of a quantity, but they continue to test the results by making additional measurements. If those measurements give the same results, scientists’ confidence in the conclusions grows.

Although potent evidence buttresses RTB’s cosmic creation model, results from a large survey of distant galaxies continue to provide dramatic confirmation. Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have produced the most comprehensive survey of distant galaxies to date. Using a particular subset of galaxies in the survey—red luminous galaxies—the team of scientists measured numerous characteristics of the universe that could either verify or falsify RTB’s creation model.

The first step in measuring these characteristics required quantifying the correlations in the spatial distribution of the galaxies (shown as acoustic peaks in a graph), similar to the methods used to analyze the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The acoustic peaks from the galaxy distributions, if found, would provide a picture of the universe at an age of two billion years. This picture could then be compared with the corresponding picture imprinted on the CMB when the universe was only 380,000 years old.

Researchers did find the acoustic peak. The peak is “smoking gun” evidence that the density fluctuations measured in the CMB grew by simple gravitational attraction to become the galaxies and clusters of galaxies observed today. While previous work indirectly pointed to this conclusion, these results provide a direct confirmation.

The size, shape, and location of the acoustic peak also allowed the team to gauge other important characteristics of the universe. They found that:

  1. The value of the density of matter extracted from the acoustic peak matches values obtained via other techniques.
  2. The size of the acoustic peak requires the presence of dark matter during the era of CMB production.
  3. The shape of the acoustic peak provides a geometrical argument for the existence of dark energy (a.k.a. space energy density).

More recently, the SDSS team measured the amount of dark energy in the universe today as 77.0 ± 5.1%. This value matches the measurements made by the WMAP team.

It is significant to note that the SDSS measurements are independent of previous techniques. Consequently, the results had the potential to contradict fundamental aspects of RTB’s creation model, which is derived from the Bible and predicts the basic features of big bang cosmology. Remarkably, the findings affirmed every aspect of the model pertinent to the study. Therefore, it can now be verified that the essential characteristics of RTB’s cosmic creation model are confirmed nearly beyond doubt.

Subjects: Two Creation Model, Universe Design

Dr. Jeff Zweerink
