A leading science journal declared the breakthrough of the year to be the confirmation, in precise amounts, of dark energy and dark matter, and some of the credit for the universe-altering findings belongs to local researchers.

In yesterday's issue of Science, staff writer Charles Seife noted that the advance "ends a decades-long argument about the nature of the universe and confirms that our cosmos is much, much stranger than we ever imagined."

Scientists everywhere are now trying to get a handle on that strangeness, said Robert Nichol, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was a member of the local research team.

"It's Pandora's box and Mardi Gras at the same time," he said. "All the theorists in the world are having a field day."

In February, NASA researchers shared what they had learned from a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which made a detailed map of the microwave background of the cosmos.

"It's a microwave picture that looks back to when the universe was only 380,000 years old, which is an instant after the Big Bang" in cosmological terms, Nichol said.

The NASA team's analysis revealed that the universe is 73 percent dark energy and 23 percent dark matter. Only 4 percent of it is what we consider ordinary matter, Nichol said.

University of Pittsburgh post-doctoral fellow Ryan Scranton then led another team of scientists, which included Nichol and others from Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, in a more direct experiment to prove the existence of dark energy.

They reasoned that if gravity was unopposed, galaxies should be falling in on themselves and light should lose a little energy as it travels through them. But dark energy would oppose gravity and cause the galaxies to expand, so light would gain a little energy.

The team combined the WMAP data with information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has already mapped a quarter-million galaxies. The effect was very small, only a millionth of a change in energy gained, but it was clearly there, Nichol said.

"We got a positive result," he said. "So there has to be dark energy."

Now, as Seife put it, "[scientists] are trying to find out what it's made of, and what it tells us about the birth and evolution of the universe."

In addition to the dark energy breakthrough, the magazine named nine runners-up, including the identification of genes that increase the risk of developing some mental illnesses, studies indicating evidence of global warming and drugs that starve cancer cells of blood supplies.