What Do We Really Know about Cosmic Acceleration?

Abstract

Essentially all of our knowledge of the acceleration history of the Universe - including the acceleration itself - is predicated upon the validity of general relativity. Without recourse to this assumption, we use SNeIa to analyze the expansion history and find (i) very strong (5 sigma) evidence for a period of acceleration, (ii) strong evidence that the acceleration has not been constant, (iii) evidence for an earlier period of deceleration and (iv) only weak evidence that the Universe has not been decelerating since z~0.3.