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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the looking-for-the-wrong-thing dept.

New evidence shows that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error:

The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift.

New observations and analysis made by a team of astronomers at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), together with their collaborators at Lyon University and KASI, show, however, that this key assumption is most likely in error. The team has performed very high-quality (signal-to-noise ratio ~175) spectroscopic observations to cover most of the reported nearby early-type host galaxies of SN Ia, from which they obtained the most direct and reliable measurements of population ages for these host galaxies. They find a significant correlation between SN luminosity and stellar population age at a 99.5 percent confidence level. As such, this is the most direct and stringent test ever made for the luminosity evolution of SN Ia. Since SN progenitors in host galaxies are getting younger with redshift (look-back time), this result inevitably indicates a serious systematic bias with redshift in SN cosmology. Taken at face values, the luminosity evolution of SN is significant enough to question the very existence of dark energy. When the luminosity evolution of SN is properly taken into account, the team found that the evidence for the existence of dark energy simply goes away (see Figure 1).

Commenting on the result, Prof. Young-Wook Lee (Yonsei Univ., Seoul), who led the project said, "Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption."

More information:

Early-Type Host Galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae. II. Evidence for Luminosity Evolution in Supernova Cosmology, Astrophysical Journalarxiv.org/abs/1912.04903

Journal information: Astrophysical Journal


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  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:11PM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:11PM (#941471) Journal

    It is almost like they took and applied a random factor to the universe.

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