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NEW EVIDENCE: EXPANSION OF UNIVERSE IS ACCELERATING

A team of UK and Australian astronomers has discovered new, independent evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Their findings have just appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A team of 27 astronomers led by Professor George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge has published strong evidence for the existence of dark energy using an entirely different technique.

Their results show that the universe is full of dark energy, completely consistent with the earlier supernovae results. "Dark energy appears to exist and to dominate over more conventional types of matter" says Professor Efstathiou. "An explanation of the dark energy may involve String Theory, extra dimensions or even what happened before the Big Bang. At present nobody knows. The ball is now firmly in the theorists court."

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0203/22expansion/

You're right Andrzej, the 2dF galaxy z survey people invest pretty heavily in propaganda about rather modest results! But they need to justify their funding under the Rupert Murdoch/IMF/WTO/WB media/political regime which opposes rational discussion and balanced publication of empirical data... So we can't really blame them for struggling for survival! And nothing seems to be incorrect in the RAS news release, it is just misleading by omission - which is a perfectly standard method of propaganda in democracies. (See http://www.medialens.org or http://www.mwaw.org for media criticism from the heart of what's left of Her Majesty's Empire.)

Anyways, here's the article: http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0109152 "Evidence for a non-zero Lambda and a low matter density from a combined analysis of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies"

They don't even bother to cite the paper based on the 2dF *quasar* z survey, posted three months earlier:

http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106135

which has evidence for a non-zero Lambda and a low matter density from analysis of a *single* survey, the 2QZ-10K early release.

Gary Mamon thinks we should spend some time in making propaganda, sorry, "media relations", for our result, but I think it's better to concentrate on getting new results which cannot be ignored. ;) And then the best way for a propaganda campaign, sorry, for public relations, will be to release a GNU/Linux self-contained easy-to-compile and run software package which any cosmologist can easily run for herself and be convinced of the results...

BTW, Efstathiou et al. use maximum likelihood, which means, if I understand it correctly, that they really only show that a non-zero Lambda, low Omega_m model is *more* likely than other models, they don't reject a zero-Lambda model.

In contrast, we use absolute probabilities of null hypothesis rejection, so we *do* reject the zero-Lambda model and high matter density models.

Pozdrawiam Boud