Dark Energy proven not to exist?

[Brian G Turner]

I've always though the original observations claiming the existing of Dark Energy were deeply flawed and rested on false assumptions. Latest research suggests this is exactly the case:

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...

phys.org

Simply put, the original science team presumed that all the supernova they were observing should have exactly the same brightness. The new research suggests that brightness does in fact vary a little - enough to complete negate any need for a "Dark Energy" explanation.

I like this quote from one of the researchers:

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."

 

[Venusian Broon]

Loads of stuff coming out about this, possibly the fruit of the Nobel prize - as I guess a lot of teams might have started looking into it at around that time to try and make observations to study the Dark Energy mystery, and these results are now coming through the system.

Here is Sabine Hossenfelder talking about another study which suggested the same sort of result, from about a month ago, but from a different angle. (It's a different team):

I think however your title is a bit strong. Proven not to exist - no I'd not say something like that right now. But there are now serious doubts - more observations and new thinking will be required to come to better conclusions.

 

[tinkerdan]

It seems more that we are dealing again with hypothesis vs theory vs law.
Most of this--from the reading of this and subsequent exploration of nomenclature about SN la and such prove only that thy are in a mostly hypothesis area with these notions. The strong hypothesis of dark energy has now been set back by a hypothesis that disputes previous 'tests'. There might come a time when this information is found to be lacking; however, either way they need more evidence of consistency on their assumptions before they try to give it too much credence.

So far what I see is that there may have been some who jumped the gun in assuming dark energy--ie: not enough solid evidence yet and now someone has posited a possible proof against dark energy.

Even their fig 1 has misleading--leader to the header:
'Luminosity evolution mimicking dark energy in supernova (SN) cosmology.'
Expanding that out makes it clear where it latter states.
'The comparison of our evolution curve with SN data shows that the luminosity evolution can mimic Hubble residuals used in the discovery and inference of the dark energy.'

It just struck me as odd at first that an article disputing the existence of dark energy would say that anything would mimic that which they dispute exists.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I think however your title is a bit strong

True - I realized after I should have put a question mark there - now added! - but I remember when the study was originally published I thought it was an incredible leap of imagination from so little evidence.

Cheers for the video link, though - it's good to see people finally challenging this.

 

[Brian G Turner]

hypothesis vs theory vs law

That's the thing - Dark Energy was just a hypothesis, not a theory or law. There was simply the observation by a small group of researchers that certain supernova should all look the same. But, when they found some looked slightly dimmer than expected, they proposed a completely new force of nature to explain it - which was accepted! - even though there was never any evidence anywhere for such a new force.

The new study linked from the opening post suggests that the fundamental assumption behind the original hypothesis for Dark Energy was flawed, and provide evidence to back their claim - as opposed to the proponents of Dark Energy who had known, just a vaguely imagined new fundamental law of the universe.

I've been ranting about this for years. Here's one of my posts from 2003 suggesting that - in fact - the underlying assumptions must be flawed:

Expansion of the Universe

What do people here really think about the concept of Dark Energy and the accelerated expansion of the universe? Without getting into another rant ( ;) ) I'll list my thinking and why I'm surprised the whole concept has gained such credibility: Two people do some measurements of Type 1A...

www.sffchronicles.com

Which is precisely what is slowly being accepted more than fifteen years later!

 

[tinkerdan]

One problem that they have, just to begin, is that they don't all agree on what the hubble constant is. In fact through out the years it has been this moving target with variable margins of error.

They then use that for determining red shift which concerns math with astronomical numbers and a margin of error that could look like some strange dark force in either direction when they each start using a different constant.

There are still a large number of assumptions going into all of this from the beginning. Some of those might be just a bit off or completely incorrect, and that can exponentially increase errors.

This all begins to sound similar to theoretical physics--except currently the universe is visible to us a bit longer than some of those imagined particles.

 

[J Riff]

Never hern of it until recently... but, Dork Energy is demonstrably real, even though some are dimmer than others.. according to scientists who get paid a fair amount.

 

[StilLearning]

One problem that they have, just to begin, is that they don't all agree on what the hubble constant is. In fact through out the years it has been this moving target with variable margins of error.

They then use that for determining red shift which concerns math with astronomical numbers and a margin of error that could look like some strange dark force in either direction when they each start using a different constant.

There are still a large number of assumptions going into all of this from the beginning. Some of those might be just a bit off or completely incorrect, and that can exponentially increase errors.

This all begins to sound similar to theoretical physics--except currently the universe is visible to us a bit longer than some of those imagined particles.

I'm still in touch with a few researchers from my uni days, several of whom work in astrophysics and say very similar things about dark matter - they're developing MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) theories of gravity as an alternative. One is especially unkind to both dark matter and dark energy research, and routinely compares them to belief in astrology (I do read my horoscope, I'll admit, for entertainment).