The Universe Is Expanding But Not At An Accelerating Rate, New Research Debunks Nobel Prize Theory


Our universe is expanding, but perhaps not at the constantly accelerating rate we previously thought.

In 2011, three U.S.-born scientists — Saul Perlmutter of Berkeley National Laboratory, Brian Schmidt of Australian National University, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University — won the Nobel Prize for physics, Al Jazeera reported at the time.

Their work focused on the Big Bang, exploding stars, and the expansion of the universe. The most compelling conclusion the physicists drew from their research was the theory that the universe was not only expanding, but it was also expanding at an ever-accelerating rate.

“(It was) one of the truly great discoveries in the history of science, and one whose implications are not fully understood,” Princeton University physics professor Paul Steinhardt told Al Jazeera.

Based on this theory, “in a trillion years, galaxies will be spread apart from each other by more than the current size of the universe,” Steinhardt explained.

The entire basis of that theory came into question this week with the publication of a new article in Scientific Reports.

The report is titled “Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae,” and it was written by J. T. Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute, A. Guffanti of the Universita degli Studi di Torino, and S. Sarkar, also of the Niels Bohr Institute.

They explain in the abstract of the paper that one problem with the theory of accelerating expansion is that it was based on previous versions of the Hubble diagram of Type Ia supernovae. In recent years, however, significantly more data on Type Ia supernovae has become available.

“There exists now a much bigger database of supernovae so we can perform rigorous statistical tests to check whether these ‘standardisable candles’ indeed indicate cosmic acceleration,” the report reads. “Taking account of the empirical procedure by which corrections are made to their absolute magnitudes to allow for the varying shape of the light curve and extinction by dust, we find, rather surprisingly, that the data are still quite consistent with a constant rate of expansion.”

As an article from Futurism explains, Nielsen and his team studied a catalog of 740 Type Ia supernovae, which equates to roughly 10 times as many subjects as Perlmutter and is team studied in the 1990s.

Because of the limited number of Type Ia supernovae looked at in the earlier study, Nielsen and his colleagues conclude that “accelerated expansion theory falls short of scientific accuracy,” Futurism notes.

Another perplexing aspect of the new study is that it calls into question much of what is presumed to be known about dark energy and its role in the expansion of the universe.

The research that won Perlmutter and his colleagues the Nobel Prize inspired the theory that “the universe is dominated by ‘dark energy’ that behaves like a cosmological constant,” Sarkar explained to Phys.org. This is the so-called “standard model” of cosmology that has been widely accepted since Perlmutter and his team’s research gained traction.

Sarkar suggests that, based on the new research, dark energy might not even come into play when understanding how the universe expands.

“A more sophisticated theoretical framework accounting for the observation that the universe is not exactly homogeneous and that its matter content may not behave as an ideal gas — two key assumptions of standard cosmology — may well be able to account for all observations without requiring dark energy,” Sarkar told Phys.org.

While the new study is getting considerable attention, there’s no guarantee it will replace the “standard model” theory. That would more than likely take more research.

In the meantime, we can all agree that the universe is expanding. We just aren’t sure how fast it’s expanding.

[Featured Image by NASA/Getty Images]

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