The acceleration of the expansion of the universe confirmed

By Michael on January 31, 2008 at 2:57 am | In Blog Posts, cosmology |

Via Cosmic Log:

Ten years after supernovae provided the first evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, a survey of more than 10,000 galaxies has provided independent confirmation that the cosmic speed-up factor known as dark energy is for real.

Cosmic Log provides a very nice analysis of this press release from the European Organisation for Astronomical Research (ESO).

So it seems that the expansion of the universe is indeed accelerating. This means that cosmological constant is non-zero and dark energy, or some alternate explanation, is necessary to explain the observations. Our cosmology seems to be consistent and correct in terms of what is happening, we just don’t know why it is happening.