Saturday, October 22, 2016

Dark Energy

I've always been leery of claims about dark energy and the universe expanding more rapidly (and of the initial inflation). Do we really understand the behavior and distribution of Type 1A supernovae well enough to draw conclusions? " The teams found that more than 50 distant type 1a supernovae are fainter than expected for their measured redshift." 50 is not a very big number.

A recent paper says no; with more supernovae and a different statistical analysis approach that doesn't treat them all the same finds that the distribution is consistent with a constant expansion. Please follow that last link, and look at the second figure. The blue curve is the dark energy model and the red dashed line is the constant expansion model.

I don't know if this group made any major mistakes--I'm not expert enough on supernovae. But it looks like the foundation for dark energy was worse than I thought. (And I'm not convinced about initial inflation.) "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

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