The latest cosmology controversy - accelerating or decelerating? #shorts

What if Nobel Prize winning science was wrong? And not wrong in a small way. Wrong in a way that changes everything we think we know about the Universe. That's the big argument that’s raging in cosmology right now. In 1998, two teams of astronomers discovered that the Universe isn't just expanding, the expansion is accelerating . Something is pushing it apart faster. We call that something dark energy, and have since found lots of other pieces of evidence for it, but still don’t really know what it is yet. That’s what won the Nobel Prize back in 2011, and has since become one of the pillars of our best model of the Universe. But recently a group of cosmologists, Son and collaborators, have claimed the supernova data used to make the discovery has been hiding a bias for thirty years. Which when you correct for that bias, switches the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion rate to a deceleration. Now, like with any paper that poses a big challenge to the most widely accepted theory, this has been getting lots of attention, in both the research community and online. However, I want to make it really clear, up front, that alot of cosmologists aren’t fully convinced by the evidence from Son and collaborators. There’s been lots of rebuttal papers published, claiming the bias in the supernova data has already been accounted for, meaning the Universe is still accelerating. But at the heart of this latest scientific discussion is a question that every cosmologist recognises as a big problem. Do we really understand the supernovae we've been using as our cosmic distance measures for the past thirty years? Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com