Super-supernovae spell trouble for dark energy

WHEN Andy Howell announced what he had found, a gasp filled the lecture hall. "Nobody saw it coming," he says.

That was in Prague in 2006. Howell, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union presenting his team's latest observations of the exploding stars known as type-1a supernovae. We think we know what makes these stellar bombs tick ? and a lot rides on us knowing it. Above all, they detonate with a similar brightness, a fact that allows us to calibrate distance in the universe. Observations of type-1a supernovae led 15 years ago to one of the landmark discoveries of modern cosmology: that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, fuelled by a shadowy agent since dubbed dark energy.

Except if what Howell was saying was right, things weren't that simple. He and his colleagues had seen ...

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