🖤 Dark energy—it’s not just a phase, Mom. This image from NASAHubble shows off Abell 209, a massive galaxy cluster located about 2.8 billion light-years away from Earth. Over a hundred galaxies glow in this image, but what occupies the darkness is just as intriguing. The space between those galaxies is filled with superheated gas, only visible at X-ray wavelengths. And perhaps the most mysterious part of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact absorb, reflect, or emit light, making it invisible to us. By observing how dark matter affects normal matter, astronomers hypothesize that the universe is made up of about 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. Our orbiting Hubble telescope can help us unravel cosmic mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. Galaxy clusters like this one have immense mass that can bend the fabric of spacetime itself, often creating warped and magnified images through a process called gravitational lensi...