[photon]

More on the accelerating expansion of the universe.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswi...-accelerating/

Subir Sarkar is right… but he’s also wrong in a colossal way. If the only thing you knew about the Universe was that we had this supernova data, we wouldn’t be able to get this far. But we also assume that General Relativity is correct, that Hubble’s Law is valid and that these supernovae are good distance indicators for how the Universe expands. Nielsen, Guffanti and Sarkar have no problems with those assumptions. So why not use the other basic pieces of information that we know, like the fact that the Universe contains matter.

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In addition, as soon as the first WMAP data came back, of the Cosmic Microwave Background, we recognized that the Universe was almost perfectly spatially flat.

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There actually is a nice result from this paper: it perhaps will cause a rethink of the standard likelihood analysis used by teams analyzing supernova data. It also shows just how incredible our data is: even with using none of our knowledge about the matter in the Universe or the flatness of space, we can still arrive at a better-than-3σ result supporting an accelerating Universe. But it also underscores something else that’s far more important. Even if all of the supernova data were thrown out and ignored, we have more than enough evidence at present to be extremely confident that the Universe is accelerating, and made of about 2/3 dark energy.