Laszlo Dobos, of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, and Istvan Szapudi, of the University of Hawaii in the USA, have developed a model that explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without the need for dark energy.
The frame at top left (red) shows the expansion according to the conventional 'lambda cold dark matter (LCDM)' model. The central top frame (blue) shows the expansion of the universe in the new AvERA model taking structure into account. On the top right (green) is the simpler Einstein-de Sitter model, accepted in the second half of the twentieth century. In each case one dot roughly represents an entire galaxy cluster.
The frame at bottom centre shows how the scale of the universe increases over time in the three different models, using the same colours as above.
Units of scale in each are Megaparsecs (Mpc), and 1 Mpc is around 3 million million million km.
Credit: István Csabai et al.
