Cosmic expansion is it accelerating?

[andrew s]

It seems it might not be after all. See here http://www.nature.com/articles/srep35596

This part of their conclusion "That the SN Ia Hubble diagram appears consistent with an uniform rate of expansion has been noted earlier. We have confirmed this by a statistically principled analysis, using the JLA catalogue of 740 SN Ia processed by the SALT2 method. We find marginal (i.e. <3sigma ) evidence for the widely accepted claim that the expansion of the universe is presently accelerating".

Regards Andrew

[goodricke1]

Looks like they may have to take back that Nobel prize... presume Saul and the boys have already spent the moolah

[andrew s]

The discussion of Physics forum tends to dismiss the paper's conclusions on two counts. Firstly, as the acceleration only became apparent recently an analysis of the whole curve (which was linear for most of the period) was bound to give this result. Secondly it only looks at one type of data other studies looked at several data sets and support the current view see here or example http://supernova.lbl.gov/union/ .

So it looks like they can keep their prizes.

Regards Andrew

[George Jones]

See also the post and discussion at cosmologist Peter Coles' blog,

https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/a-non-accelerating-universe/

including comments by Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt.