Paper: astro-ph/0512586
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 03:40:54 GMT (472kb)

Title: What Do We Really Know About Cosmic Acceleration?

Authors: Charles Shapiro (1,2), Michael S. Turner (1,2) ((1) University of
Chicago, (2) Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics)

Comments: 9 pages, 8 figures
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Essentially all of our knowledge of the acceleration history of the Universe
- including the acceleration itself - is predicated upon the validity of
general relativity. Without recourse to this assumption, we use SNeIa to
analyze the expansion history and find (i) very strong (5 sigma) evidence for a
period of acceleration, (ii) strong evidence that the acceleration has not been
constant, (iii) evidence for an earlier period of deceleration and (iv) only
weak evidence that the Universe has not been decelerating since z~0.3.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512586 , 472kb)