In cosmology, the cosmological constant (usually denoted by the Greek capital lambda: Λ) is the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. It was originally introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917 as an addition to his theory of general relativity to "hold back gravity" and a static universe, which was the accepted view at the time. Einstein abandoned the concept after Hubble's 1929 discovery that all galaxies outside the Local Group (the group that contains the Milky Way Galaxy) are moving away from each other, implying an overall expanding universe. From 1929 until the early 1990s, most cosmology researchers assumed the cosmological constant to be zero.

Since the 1990s, several developments in observational cosmology, have shown that around 68% of the mass- energy density of the universe can be attributed to dark energy. While dark energy is poorly understood at a fundamental level, the main required properties of dark energy is that it functions as a type of anti-gravity, it dilutes much more slowly than matter as the universe expands, and it clusters much more weakly than matter , or perhaps not at all. The cosmological constant is the simplest possible form of dark energy as it is the standard model of cosmology known as the Lambda-CDM model, which provides a good fit to many cosmological observations.