Far out cosmology: dark energy may not exist (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, December 02, 2019, 00:12 (1606 days ago) @ David Turell

The problem is the discovery that the local neighborhood is all flowing in one direction, which skews the supernova measurement of the red shift. Objects we move toward will have a shorter distance measurement while ones in the opposite direction will appear further away:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/dark-energy-might-not-exist-after-all.html

"To briefly remind you, dark energy is what speeds up the expansion of the universe.

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"The most important evidence we have for the existence of dark energy comes from supernova redshifts. Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize for this observation in 2011. It’s this Nobel-prize winning discovery which the new paper calls into question.

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"Now, Perlmutter and Riess did their analysis 20 years ago and they used a fairly small sample of about 110 supernovae. Meanwhile, we have data for more than 1000 supernovae. For the new paper, the researchers used 740 supernovae from the JLA catalogue. But they also explain that if one just uses the data from this catalogue as it is, one gets a wrong result. The reason is that the data has been “corrected” already.

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"What they found is that the best fit to the data is that the redshift of supernovae is not the same in all directions, but that it depends on the direction. This direction is aligned with the direction in which we move through the cosmic microwave background. And – most importantly – you do not need further redshift to explain the observations.

"If what they say is correct, then it is unnecessary to postulate dark energy which means that the expansion of the universe might not speed up after all.

"Why didn’t Perlmutter and Riess come to this conclusions? They could not, because the supernovae that they looked were skewed in direction. The ones with low redshift were in the direction of the CMB dipole; and high redshift ones away from it. With a skewed sample like this, you can’t tell if the effect you see is the same in all directions.*

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"This paper, I have to emphasize, has been peer reviewed, is published in a high quality journal, and the analysis meets the current scientific standard of the field. It is not a result that can be easily dismissed and it deserves to be taken very seriously, especially because it calls into question a Nobel Prize winning discovery. This analysis has of course to be checked by other groups and I am sure we will hear about this again, so stay tuned."

Comment: The original Nobel prize paper predicted that the universe was expanding faster and faster. This paper says the Hubble Constant of expansion is the same steady rate we thought it was. Wow. True science is self-correcting. I wish Darwinism was.