Scientists May Be Sure of the Accelerating Universe But Not Yet

We have heard quite a bit the Universe is expanding faster and that hasn't grokked much since it's too impossibly big to imagine and it gets bigger than that ... or not.  (Science Daily:  The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, or is it?)

Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers for their discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.  This led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by a mysterious substance named 'dark energy' that drives this accelerating expansion.  Now, a team of scientists has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept.  The evidence for acceleration may be flimsier than previously thought, they say, with the data being consistent with a constant rate of expansion.

- Science Daily

There's one little problem with dark matter, that no-one has been able to find it.  If you're guessing the scientists today are going to dump all over the idea of dark energy, take a bow.

'So it is quite possible that we are being misled and that the apparent manifestation of dark energy is a consequence of analysing the data in an oversimplified theoretical model -- one that was in fact constructed in the 1930s, long before there was any real data.  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.  Indeed, vacuum energy is something of which we have absolutely no understanding in fundamental theory.'

- Science Daily

That looks like a shotgun blast into the heart of the current view of physics and likely there will be repercussions.  It's such a big deal, the first response is likely at least one other research team will try to duplicate the result to either corroborate or refute the research.

Dark matter and dark energy have been at the heart of things for years and these guns are seriously shooting that all to hell.  You pays your money and you takes your chance with theoretical physics because sometimes it's going to poof and maybe this just did.

This is a heartbreaker for younger uni students since they have long been kind of smug with the vibe of, oh, you really don't get it with dark matter?  Well, gee ...

Just now we're amused because it doesn't really seem anyone gets it with dark matter, do they.