Dark energy is at the heart of one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics, but it may be nothing more than an illusion, according physicists at Oxford University.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) uses a 2.5-meter telescope with a wider field of view than any other large telescope, located on a mountaintop in New Mexico called Apache Point and devoted solely to mapping the universe.

NASA released this week five years of data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) that refines our understanding of the universe and its development. It is a treasure trove of information, including at least three major findings:

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure the distribution and motions of thousands of galaxies in the distant Universe. This opens fascinating perspectives to better understand what drives the acceleration of the cosmic expansion and sheds new light on the mysterious dark energy that is thought to permeate the Universe.

Three quarters of our universe is made up of some weird, gravitationally repulsive substance that was only discovered ten years ago – dark energy. This month in Physics World, Eric Linder and Saul Perlmutter, both at the University of California at Berkeley, reveal how little we know about dark energy and describe what advances in our knowledge of dark energy we can expect in the coming decade from a series of planned space missions.

HAVE we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That’s the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy should pursue the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) as the first mission in the "Beyond Einstein" program, according to a new report from the National Research Council. Beyond Einstein is NASA's research roadmap for five proposed mission areas to study the most compelling questions at the intersection of physics and astronomy.

The National Research Council's Beyond Einstein Program Assessment Committee has recommended that the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), jointly supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, be the first of NASA's Beyond Einstein cosmology missions to be developed and launched.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are the first to observe and measure the internal motion inside proteins, or its “dark energy.” This research, appearing in the current issue of Nature, has revealed how the internal motion of proteins affects their function and overturns the standard view of protein structure-function relationships, suggesting why rational drug design has been so difficult.