Observation of Cosmic Acceleration and Determining the Fate of the Universe

Abstract

Current observations of Type Ia supernovae provide evidence for cosmic acceleration out to a redshift of $z \lsim 1$, leading to the possibility that the universe is entering an inflationary epoch. However, inflation can take place only if vacuum-energy (or other sufficiently slowly redshifting source of energy density) dominates the energy density of a region of physical radius 1/H. We argue that for the best-fit values of ${\Omega }_{\Lambda }$ and ${\Omega }_m$ inferred from the supernovae data, one must confirm cosmic acceleration out to at least $z\simeq 1.8$ to infer that the universe is inflating.

4 pages;important changes in conclusion; published in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (3)

• Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant
• Constraints on Cosmological Models from Hubble Space Telescope Observations of High-z Supernovae
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