Apr 10, 2017 12:22 PM EDT By Mark Spencer, UniversityHerald Reporter

A recent study has challenged a long-held theory that an unseen force known as dark energy powers the expansion of the universe. The apparent 68 percent of the universe may not exist at all claimed the new study.

A Hungarian-American research team believes that the concept of dark energy merely fills in gaps left by existing models of the universe. However, such models depend on approximations and fail to address its changing structure. When the model is amended, the gaps in the model disappear, and so does the need for dark energy within the model.

The study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society disputes that known models of the universe failed to unravel and understand the mysteries behind the structure of the cosmos.

According to Futurism, the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago caused our universe to expand. Hubble's law provides a key piece of evidence supporting this expansion. The law states that the speed with which the galaxies move away from us are proportional to its recessional velocity.

However, astronomers noticed that they needed something to account for the motion of the stars within galaxies, and that brought about the idea of an unseen "dark matter." After observing Type Ia supernovae in the 1990s, astronomers concluded that 68 percent of the cosmos is made up entirely of dark energy. This along with 5 percent of conventional matter and 27 percent of dark matter, fuels the expansion of the universe, according to Science Daily.

Hungarian researchers led by Gabor Racz from Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University, also pointed out in their argument that in existing cosmological models, matter has a uniform density, relied heavily on approximations and completely ignores its structure.

The conclusion follows after experts reconstructed the evolution of the universe. Considering everything everything they thought existed when the universe came into being. What they found resulted in a model where different parts of it expanded at a different pace, unlike the uniform and smooth expansion from older models.

However, the expansion rate remained consistent with present observations suggesting an overall acceleration. Therefore, dark energy is not needed to explain rapid expansion of the universe.

According to Dr. Dobos, they do not question the old model's validity; they question the validity of approximate solutions. Furthermore, they say their findings rely on a mathematical conjecture permitting the differential expansion of space, which is consistent with general relativity. It does show that complex matter formation affects expansion.

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