Indian-origin Oxford scientist rejects Nobel-Prize-winning conclusion about cosmic acceleration

Subir Sarkar and his colleagues at Oxford have raised some serious questions about the conclusions regarding expansion of the universe and existence of dark energy.

The Indian-born physicist and his team took issue with the supernovae-related evidence that was used to come up with the original Nobel-worthy conclusion, according to an article in bigthink.com.

According to the website, the Nobel Prize for the cosmic acceleration idea was won by Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess for “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”. 

 A new paper from a group of physicists raised some key questions that include, Is our Universe’s expansion speeding up? what if the evidence they used to come up with this conclusion was wrongly interpreted and the supposed cosmic acceleration is simply an artifact of our movement through a local part of the Universe?

They said, in the big picture, there’s no speeding up. What’s also not there is the mysterious dark energy, thought to be creating that acceleration.

Read complete article here.

Who is Subir Sarkar?

Subir Sarkar was born and educated in India, obtaining his PhD from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay in 1982. Since 1990 he has been at the University of Oxford where he is now Head of the Particle Theory Group at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics.