“The care with which we performed the study in an unbiased manner seems to have caught the attention of the community.”

The supernova observations suggest that nearly 70% of the energy density in the universe is exotic and exerts negative pressure. The nature of this "dark energy" has been the leading area of investigation in recent years and most of the work used the data we have also studied in this paper. Our paper, however, critically examined the nature of the data and showed that: (a) one needs to be careful in assessing the statistical significance of the results and (b) the data may not be very useful in actually determining the nature of the dark energy. The care with which we performed the study in an unbiased manner seems to have caught the attention of the community.

We have devised a transparent, simple, unbiased and, at the same time, sharp methodology to analyze the data and present the results. This methodology brings out both the strengths and weaknesses of the data and allows a wider community to appreciate the underlying assumptions better.

The cosmological observations of the distant supernovae seem to indicate that the universe is not only expanding, but is accelerating. This requires the existence of dark energy with negative pressure. The key challenge today is to use/devise observations to determine whether the dark energy density is constant in time or whether it varies. There have been different claims in the literature in the past in this regard. We have devised some simple and robust techniques which show that: (a) the data implies an accelerating universe beyond doubt, but (b) may not be good enough to determine the precise nature of the dark energy source responsible for this acceleration.

The nature of the dark energy is THE key problem of the millennium and we were naturally drawn into this and have worked at different aspects of the problem. There were numerous papers coming out every day, trying to reinterpret the data in various manners. We decided to re-analyze the data from a theoretician’s perspective and also to use transparent techniques to determine its implications.

We, the cosmologists, are trying to understand the evolution of our universe using fundamental and sophisticated physics. It is very difficult to identify any immediate impact of such fundamental research on the society in general.