Dark energy, mysterious as it sounds, has become part of the furniture in cosmology. The evidence that this repulsive energy infuses space has stacked up since 1998. That was the year astronomers first discovered that the expansion of the universe has been speeding up over time, with dark energy acting as the accelerator. As space expands, new space arises, and with it more of this repulsive energy, causing space to expand even faster.

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Two decades later, multiple independent measurements agree that dark energy comprises about 70 percent of the universe’s contents. It is so baked into our current understanding of the cosmos that it came as a surprise when a recent paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics questioned whether it’s there at all.

The four authors, including the Oxford physicist Subir Sarkar, performed their own analysis of data from hundreds of supernovas—the stellar explosions that provided the first evidence for cosmic acceleration, a discovery that earned three astronomers the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. When Sarkar and his colleagues looked at supernovas, they didn’t see a universe that’s accelerating uniformly in all directions due to dark energy. Rather, they say supernovas look the way they do because our region of the cosmos is accelerating in a particular direction—roughly toward the constellation Centaurus in the southern sky.

Outside experts almost immediately began picking the paper apart, finding apparent flaws in its methodology. Now, two cosmologists have formalized those arguments and others in a paper that was posted online on December 6 and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. The authors, David Rubin and his student Jessica Heitlauf of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, detail four main problems with Sarkar and company’s data handling. “Is the expansion of the universe accelerating?” their paper title asks. “All signs still point to yes.”

Outside researchers praised the thorough dissection. “The arguments by Rubin et al. are very convincing,” said Dragan Huterer, a cosmologist at the University of Michigan. “Some of them I was aware of upon looking at the original [Astronomy & Astrophysics paper], and others are new to me but make a lot of sense.”

However, Sarkar and his co-authors—Jacques Colin and Roya Mohayaee of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and Mohamed Rameez of the University of Copenhagen—don’t agree with the criticisms. Days after Rubin and Heitlauf’s paper appeared, they posted a rebuttal of the rebuttal.

The cosmology community remains unmoved. Huterer said this latest response at times “misses the point” and attempts to debate statistical principles that are “not negotiable.” Dan Scolnic, a supernova cosmologist at Duke University, reaffirmed that “the evidence for dark energy from supernovas alone is significant and secure.”

A Moving Shot

The expansion of space stretches light, reddening its color. Supernovas appear more “redshifted” the farther away they are, because their light has to travel farther through expanding space. If space expanded at a constant rate, a supernova’s redshift would be directly proportional to its distance, and thus to its brightness.

But in an accelerating universe filled with dark energy, space expanded less quickly in the past than it does now. This means a supernova’s light will have stretched less during its long journey to Earth, given how slowly space expanded during much of the time. A supernova located at a given distance away (indicated by its brightness) will appear significantly less redshifted than it would in a universe without dark energy. Indeed, researchers find that the redshift and brightness of supernovas scales in just this way.