Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1510–1513 (1999)Observation of Cosmic Acceleration and Determining the Fate of the UniverseSee Also: Erratum Received 10 February 1999; published in the issue dated 23 August 1999 Current observations of type-Ia supernovae provide evidence for cosmic acceleration out to a redshift of z≲1, leading to the possibility that the universe is entering an inflationary epoch. However, inflation can take place only if vacuum energy (or other sufficiently slowly redshifting source of energy density) dominates the energy density of a region of physical radius 1/H. We argue that, for the best-fit values of ΩΛ = 0.8 and Ωm = 0.2 inferred from the supernovae data, one must confirm cosmic acceleration out to at least z≃1.8 to infer that our portion of the universe is inflating. If ΩΛ<0.736 then no present-day measurement can confirm or falsify that inference. © 1999 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.1510
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.1510
PACS:
98.80.Es, 98.80.Cq
See AlsoErratum: Glenn Starkman, Mark Trodden, and Tanmay Vachaspati, Erratum: Observation of Cosmic Acceleration and Determining the Fate of the Universe [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1510 (1999)], Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 1846 (2000). |
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