[RadioAstronomer]

I donno. My very limited understanding of dark energy is that it only manifests its effect on a cosmological scale. In that case, it wouldn't affect the formation of planets. I think that plain old gravitational attraction would be sufficient for planetary formation. I'm pinging RA for his input (which will be much more informed than mine).

I am not so sure about that in this case. Miked or Physicist may be closer to this question. However, here is a really cool link to an ongoing compilation of knowlege that includes discussions on dark energy.

http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/

I will look into this a bit further myself as well. :-)

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the lead and for pinging others to find an answer or perhaps, more leads!

[MikeD]

It's my understanding as well that Dark Energy has only been detected on a cosmological scale. Otherwise, we'd just consider it part of the usual gravity term. The weird thing is that we measure one effect (the usual 1/r^2 force) for nearby things, but some other effect (the dark energy term) for far away things.

What is dark energy? Beats the heck out of me. Is there a fifth force that only manifests at large distances? Is there another term in the gravitational force that only exerts itself at large distances? We don't know yet.

The more we learn, the more we realize we have yet to learn...

MD