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A large international team has now run that alarm to ground. The expansion<\/a> is still speeding up, dark energy is still the best explanation, and the supposed crisis came down to a misunderstanding.<\/p>\n The rebuttal was led by Dr. Phil Wiseman, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton<\/a>, who worked with collaborators across several countries.<\/p>\n Two of the paper\u2019s authors, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the speed-up. The claim they were answering aimed straight at their life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Measuring space with stellar blasts<\/p>\n The whole field rests on one kind of stellar explosion. A white dwarf \u2013 the dense, burnt-out core of a dead star \u2013 steals gas from a companion until it passes a critical limit and blows apart.<\/p>\n These blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, all flare to nearly the same intrinsic brightness. <\/p>\n Because that brightness is already known, each one works as a standard candle. The dimmer it looks from Earth, the farther away it is.<\/p>\n In the late 1990s, two rival teams lined these explosions up across the sky. The faraway ones appeared too faint, and therefore too distant, for a universe that was merely coasting.<\/p>\n Unless something was speeding it up. That discrepancy, laid out in a now-famous paper, was the first hard sign that the universe was accelerating.<\/p>\n Testing a controversial theory<\/p>\n Standard candles only work if they stay the same across cosmic time. Old stars and young stars have to explode with matching brightness, or every distance built on them comes out wrong.<\/p>\n The team in South Korea argued that they do not. In their reading of the data, supernovae sitting in older galaxies came out slightly brighter than those in younger galaxies, even after the usual adjustments.<\/p>\n