Ken Rines, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Western Washington U, was awarded a $35,000 grant Thursday for dark energy and galaxy cluster research from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

Although no one is sure exactly what dark energy is, researchers do know the universe is expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. Dark energy, Rines said, is the apparent cause.

Rines began his career at Western in 2008 after completing his doctorate at Harvard in 2003. The Western Front spoke with Rines to find out more about dark energy.

What is ‘dark energy’ and why should we learn more about it?

We have no idea — that’s the short answer. We can only see the effects of dark energy on the universe.

We know the universe is expanding, galaxies are moving away from each other, and normally we would expect that expansion to slow down over time.

Gravitational attraction of Galaxy A on Galaxy B should make the expansion rate slow down, but instead of slowing down, it is actually accelerating.

So the galaxies are not only moving apart from each other, they’re starting to move apart from each other faster and faster, and that makes no sense.

Dark energy behaves sort of like anti-gravity. Gravity makes things come together, anti-gravity would push things apart. It’s like anti-gravity, but it works everywhere. It’s not just restricted to galaxies.

Your research involves using optical spectroscopy. Can you explain what that is?

We take images of galaxies and get spectra for them. [The spectrum] shows you what types of stars are in the galaxy and it also tells you how fast the galaxy is moving.

You take white light, shine it through a prism and you spread out the white light into a rainbow.

The reason for doing that is so you can measure the speed of a galaxy.

What is the difference between dark matter and dark energy?

Dark energy makes dark matter look normal.

You can say dark matter has gravity. Sure it has these other weird properties, but gravity is something we understand moderately well.

Dark energy actually has the opposite behavior. Dark energy actually has this anti-gravity effect. You start with the Big Bang — ­­­­­­you have little lumps of matter everywhere and then gravity takes those little lumps and tries to make bigger and bigger lumps.

Then at some point, dark energy comes along. Dark energy starts to try to take everything and spread everything apart from everything else.

Are you planning to travel for your research?

Hopefully. There are some national observatories, one in Hawaii and then there’s a couple in Chile that I’m hoping to be able to use.

Mauna Kea [in Hawaii] is one of the best sites in the world for astronomy.

What advice would you give to students who are interested in studying dark energy?

Study math and physics, definitely the most important pieces of background. Programming is also very important.
The actual astronomy part of it comes often a bit later. A lot of modern astronomy is basically applied physics. If you have a good physics background, it’s relatively easy to jump into astronomy. You don’t need to know the constellations, oddly enough.