Space discovery could change everything we know about the history of the universe

This image provided by NSF’s NOIRLab shows the trails of stars above Kitt Peak National Observatory, where a telescope is mapping the universe to study a mysterious force called dark energy - (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The great Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau once remarked that “cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt”. In studying the history of the universe itself, there is always a chance that we have got it all wrong, but we never let this stand in the way of our inquiries.

A few days ago, a new press release announced groundbreaking findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument (DESI), which is installed on the Mayall Telescope in Arizona. This vast survey, containing the positions of 15 million galaxies, constitutes the largest three-dimensional mapping of the universe to date. For context, the light from the most remote galaxies recorded in the DESI catalogue was emitted 11 billion years ago, when the universe was about a fifth of its current age.