New Data on Ancient Type Ia Supernovae Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist

thomst writes: New observations made by a team of astronomers at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), with the assistance of astronomers at Lyon University and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in analyzing the data collected, show that a key assumption that the corrected luminosity of Type Ia supernovae through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift is most likely in error. The team made very high-quality (signal-to-noise ratio ~175) spectroscopic observations to cover most of the reported nearby, early-type host galaxies of Type Ia supernovae, from which they obtained the most direct and reliable measurements to date of population ages for these host galaxies. They found a significant correlation between SN luminosity and stellar population age at a 99.5 percent confidence level. As such, this is the most direct and stringent test ever made for the luminosity evolution of SN Ia. Since SN progenitors in host galaxies are getting younger with redshift (look-back time), this result leads to the inevitable conclusion that therer is a serious systematic bias with redshift in SN cosmology. The luminosity evolution of Type Ia supernovae is significant enough to call intoquestion the very existence of dark energy. When the luminosity evolution of SN is properly taken into account, the team found that the evidence for the existence of dark energy simply goes away .