Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding – it was expanding at an accelerating rate.

The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up.

For a bit of background on the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, it was shared between cosmologists Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkeley; Adam Riess from Johns Hopkins University; and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University.

During the 1990s, these three scientists were part of competing teams that were measuring distant Type 1a supernovae – the violent end of a type of star called a white dwarf.

White dwarf stars are made from one of the densest forms of matter in the known Universe – surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes.

While a typical white dwarf will only be slightly larger than Earth, it will have around the same amount of mass as our […]

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