Comet Enthusiast

Was a dormant energy field lurking since the big bang that is now active causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate? In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Christophe Ringeval of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and his colleagues theorize that a quintessence field could be linked to a phase in the universe's history called inflation. Quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy postulated as an explanation of observations of an accelerating universe.During this phase, fractions of a second after the big bang, space-time expanded exponentially. Inflation is thought to have occurred because of another scalar field that existed at the time. But what if another, much weaker quintessence field was also around during inflation?