Some while ago, when scientists began talking about the hypothetical “dark energy” filling the unfathomable void spaces of the Universe, it sounded like they were talking about a malevolent, mysterious force, ready to pounce on our innocent patch of creation. Recent findings show that dark energy does exist, but it’s not as evil as one thought and it doesn’t even undermine Einstein’s good-old theory of relativity.

According to the Washington Post, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics took a peak at the way dark energy behaves out there by means of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, property of NASA. Their observations go hand in hand with those made in the past by the Hubble Space Telescope, which, in science, is always a good thing.

The scientists used a new technique to pinpoint the behavioral patterns of dark energy. They looked at some of the largest things to be found in the Universe, entire galactic omelettes called galactic clusters. In order to compare how these fared in the past with the way they’re forming closer to the present, the researchers selected some clusters 5.5 billion light years away (so their image was 5.5 billion years old) and some others more close to our turf.

The conclusion is that dark energy is a “cosmological constant”, a sort of antigravity. Its power has steadily increased and it will eventually lead to pushing galaxies so far away from another that the universe will be one big lonely black place. But that will happen in about 100 billion to 1 trillion years, so we’ll surely find out some other dimensions or parallel universes for the humanity franchise by then.