During a press conference today, NASA announced the fact that new measurements from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory confirm the existence of "dark energy" that is causing the universe to expand - and disintegrate at an incredible speed. It is as if the force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it. Sheer paradox. The scary thing is that this is what’s really happening, according to astronomers’ announcement on Tuesday.

The cosmologists will publish their findings in the February 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. They announced their findings during a December 16 news conference organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics say they have succeeded in producing a new technique for measuring dark energy using NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory that orbits the Earth. The results match the dark energy findings from observations of supernovas made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Billions of years ago, the universe was crowded with tight-knit clusters of galaxies. Then, a party crasher got the upper hand. This mysterious force now called dark energy has since been expanding the universe at an increasing pace. Scientists think dark energy is a form of repulsive gravity that now dominates the universe, although they have no clear picture of what it actually is.

A decade ago, astronomers studying the relatively uniform brightness of exploding stars to estimate cosmic distances discovered that the expansion of the universe appeared to be accelerating. Gravity should have been causing the expansion, which followed the big bang, to become slower with time. This gave rise to the mystery of dark energy, the unknown force theoretically responsible for the acceleration.

"If there were any doubts 10 years after the initial discovery that the universe was speeding up, this should really dispel them," said Michael Turner of the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who was not involved in the current study.

If the Universe were not expanding, forming clusters would be easy. As time went on, more matter could fall in to the cluster, forming more galaxies and making the cluster bigger. But since the Universe was expanding, there was a limit to how big the clusters could get; the outermost fringes would be moving away from the central regions, and that limited the amount of raw material available to make galaxies. So the sizes of clusters today depend on how quickly the Universe expands, and this cosmic expansion depends on the amount and flavor of dark energy infusing it.

"This result could be described as 'arrested development of the universe'," said Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., who led the research. "Whatever is forcing the expansion of the universe to speed up is also forcing its development to slow down."

If dark energy is explained by the cosmological constant, the expansion of the universe will continue to accelerate, and the Milky Way and its neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, never will merge with the Virgo cluster. In that case, about a hundred billion years from now, all other galaxies ultimately would disappear from the Milky Way's view and, eventually, the local super clusters of galaxies also would disintegrate.