LONDON: When it comes to mysteries, they don’t get much bigger than this: how did the universe begin and why did it turn out the way we see it today? A century ago, the questions inspired Albert Einstein to develop the radical ideas that made him famous. Now, Nasa plans to build on those ideas with a series of missions that will study the most exotic phenomena in the universe.

The new Einstein Probes Office (EPO), set up on Wednesday by the space agency, will coordinate five missions to study dark energy and black holes and hunt for clues to the origin and evolution of the universe — areas of physics where Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been hugely important. The plan includes two big space-based observatories and a series of smaller probes to exhaustively test Einstein’s ideas.

The main observatory, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will look for the elusive gravitational waves predicted by general relativity when it launches in 2015. Martin Barstow, head of the physics and astronomy department at Leicester University, UK, described the waves as “an oscillation in space-time, in just the same way that light is an oscillation in electromagnetic space and sound is an oscillation in gas”.

He added: “Until you really detect them, you don’t know if the theory is correct. Once you do detect them, you can use them in the same way you use light to probe processes in the universe like creation of black holes.”

The second large observatory, Constellation-X, will launch in 2016 and watch black holes as matter falls into them. Einstein made specific predictions about the behaviour of matter near a black hole and, because it will be so sensitive, Constellation-X will expose any flaws in the physicist’s calculations.

Of the other missions, the most developed is a plan for a probe to study dark energy. Though it makes up more than 70 per cent of the universe, no one knows what dark energy really is. The Joint Dark Energy Mission will study the violent star explosions called supernovas in distant galaxies in an attempt to work out how quickly they are moving away from us.

The other two proposals for the EPO are a mission to find and take detailed pictures of new black holes and one to study a crucial early time in the formation of the universe called inflation. Scientists think that around 30 seconds after the big bang, some 14bn years ago, the universe went through a split-second of rapid expansion which enabled stars to form and life to exist. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service