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Science 7 June 1996:
Vol. 272. no. 5267, pp. 1426 - 1428
DOI:

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Special News Report

Dennis Overbye

The universe has been putting on weight lately, and astronomers, like anxious parents, are pleased to see it filling out. Armed with new techniques--from charting the motions of galaxies across vast tracts of sky to looking through gravitational lenses far out in the cosmos--astronomers are finding more and more unseen mass, which controls the motions and organization of galaxies and will also determine whether the universe will continue expanding to infinity or will ultimately recollapse. But so far, they haven't found enough heft to poise the universe exactly on the borderline between a closed big-crunch universe and an open ever-expanding one. The shortfall poses difficulties for a theory of the universe's first moments known as inflation, which predicts just that borderline density. For dark matter searches on small and large scales, see http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~udalski/ogle.html and http://www.fiz.huji.ac.il/~dekel/.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)