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LONDON (PTI): An Anglo-German team of researchers has claimed that they are 99.996 per cent sure of existence of Dark energy, the mysterious cosmic force thought to be behind the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

After a two-year study, scientists at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany have concluded that the likelihood of dark energy's existence stands at 99.996 per cent.

That's the same level of certainty as this year's celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson, or a subatomic particle that looks very much like it, by scientists at the CERN research center near Geneva, the Daily Mail reported.

Many scientists have accepted dark energy as the best explanation for why the Universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate, but the theory has its skeptics.

"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn't surprising that so many researchers question its existence," Bob Nichol, a member of the Portsmouth team involved in the research, said.

"But with our new work, we're more confident than ever that this exotic component of the Universe is real - even if we still have no idea what it consists of," Nichol added.

The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.