This week, a number of media outlets have put out headlines like "The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, or is it?” and “The Universe Is Expanding But Not At An Accelerating Rate New Research Debunks Nobel Prize Theory.” This excitement is due to a paper just published in Nature’s Scientific Reports called "Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae,” by Nielsen, Guffanti and Sarkar.
Once you read the article, however, it’s safe to say there is no need to revise our present understanding of the universe. All the paper does is slightly reduce our certainty in what we know—and then only by discarding most of the cosmological data on which our understanding is based. It also ignores important details in the data it does consider. And even if you leave aside these issues, the headlines are wrong anyway. The study concluded that we’re now only 99.7 percent sure that the universe is accelerating, which is hardly the same as “it’s not accelerating.”
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