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Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists

Author:     BEC CREW
Source:     Science alert
Publication Date:     24 OCT 2016
 Link: No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists
Stephan:   This research, published in Scientific Reports, provides the latest example of how things once believed by science with certainty to be true, to a point where they become orthodoxy, can be wrong. Science is a process not a destination. Even scientists often have a hard time remembering that.

Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding – it was expanding at an accelerating rate.

The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up.

For a bit of background on the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, it was shared between cosmologists Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkeley; Adam Riess from Johns Hopkins University; and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University.

During the 1990s, these three scientists were part of competing teams that were measuring distant Type 1a supernovae – the violent end of a type of star called a white dwarf.

White dwarf stars are made from one of the densest forms of matter in the known Universe – surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes.

While a typical white dwarf will only be slightly larger than Earth, it will have around the same amount of mass as our […]

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