Supernovae as cosmological probes
  The cosmological standard model at present is widely accepted as containing
mainly things we do not understand. In particular the appearance of a
Cosmological Constant, or dark energy, is puzzling. This was first inferred
from the Hubble diagram of a low number of Type Ia supernovae, and later
corroborated by complementary cosmological probes. Today, a much larger
collection of supernovae is available, and here I perform a rigorous
statistical analysis of this dataset. Taking into account how the supernovae
are calibrated to be standard candles, we run into some subtleties in the
analysis. To our surprise, this new dataset - about an order of bigger than the
size of the original dataset - shows, under standard assumptions, only mild
evidence of an accelerated universe.
