Einstein's Biggest Blunder? High-Redshift Supernovae and the Accelerating Universe

Abstract

Nearly 4 years ago, two teams of observational astronomers reported that high-redshift Type Ia supernovae are fainter than expected in a decelerating or freely coasting universe. The radical conclusion that the universe has been accelerating in the past few billion years, possibly because of a nonzero value for Einstein's cosmological constant, has gripped the worlds of astronomy and physics, causing a flurry of new research. Having participated on both teams (but much more closely with one than the other), here I provide a personal, historical account of the story.

To appear in the December 2001 issue of PASP, as part of the `Millennium Essay' series. Text and abstract revised in some locations

References in corpus (2)

• A measurement of the cosmological mass density from clustering in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey
• The DEEP2 Redshift Survey

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Type Ia Supernova Discoveries at z>1 From the Hubble Space Telescope: Evidence for Past Deceleration and Constraints on Dark Energy Evolution
• Observational Constraints on the Nature of the Dark Energy: First Cosmological Results from the ESSENCE Supernova Survey
• Hubble Space Telescope and Ground-Based Observations of Type Ia Supernovae at Redshift 0.5: Cosmological Implications
• Not Color Blind: Using Multiband Photometry to Classify Supernovae
• The magnification of SN 1997ff, the farthest known Supernova
• A Hubble Space Telescope Snapshot Survey of Nearby Supernovae
• Type Ia Supernovae and Cosmology
• Interpretations of the Accelerating Universe