Improved Constraints on the Acceleration History of the Universe and the Properties of the Dark Energy

Understand

We extend and apply a model-independent analysis method developed earlier by Daly & Djorgovski to new samples of supernova standard candles, radio galaxy and cluster standard rulers, and use it to constrain physical properties of the dark energy as functions of redshift.

• Similar results are obtained for the radio galaxy and supernova data sets.
• The first and second derivatives of the distance are compared directly with predictions in a standard model based on General Relativity.
• The good agreement indicates that General Relativity provides an accurate description of the data on look-back time scales of about ten billion years.