On the Reality of the Accelerating Universe

Abstract

Two groups recently deduced the positive value for the cosmological constant, concluding at a high (>= 99%) confidence level that the Universe should be accelerating. This conclusion followed from the statistical analysis of dozens of high-redshift supernovae. In this paper this conclusion is discussed. From the conservative frequentist's point of view the validity of null hypothesis of the zero cosmological constant is tested by the classical statistical chi^2 test for the 60 supernovae listed in Perlmutter et al. 1999 (ApJ, 517, 565). This sample contains 42 objects discovered in the frame of Supernova Cosmology Project and 18 low-redshift object detected earlier. Excluding the event SN1997O, which is doubtlessly an outlier, one obtains the result: The probability for seeing a worse chi^2 - if the null hypothesis is true - is in the 5% to 8% range, a value that does not indicate significant evidence againts the null. If one excludes further five possible outliers, proposed to be done by Perlmutter et al. 1999, then the sample of 54 supernovae is in an excellent accordance with the null hypothesis. It also seems that upernovae from the High-z Supernova Search Team does not change the acceptance of null hypothesis. This means that the rejection of the Einstein equations with zero cosmological constant - based on the supernova data alone - is still premature.

11 pages, no figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (2)

• Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant
• Statistics: Handle with Care, Detecting Multiple Model Components with the Likelihood Ratio Test

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