The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Discovery of a supernova explosion at half the age of the Universe
Abstract
The ultimate fate of the Universe, infinite expansion or a big crunch, can be determined by using the redshifts and distances of very distant supernovae to monitor changes in the expansion rate. We can now find large numbers of these distant supernovae, and measure their redshifts and apparent brightnesses; moreover, recent studies of nearby type Ia supernovae have shown how to determine their intrinsic luminosities—and therefore with their apparent brightnesses obtain their distances. The >50 distant supernovae discovered so far provide a record of changes in the expansion rate over the past several billion years. However, it is necessary to extend this expansion history still farther away (hence further back in time) in order to begin to distinguish the causes of the expansion-rate changes—such as the slowing caused by the gravitational attraction of the Universe's mass density, and the possibly counteracting effect of the cosmological constant. Here we report the most distant spectroscopically confirmed supernova. Spectra and photometry from the largest telescopes on the ground and in space show that this ancient supernova is strikingly similar to nearby, recent type Ia supernovae. When combined with previous measurements of nearer supernovae,, these new measurements suggest that we may live in a low-mass-density universe.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant
Riess, A. G., Filippenko, A. V., Challis, P., Clocchiatti, A., Diercks, A., Garnavich, P. M., Gilliland, R. L., Hogan, C. J., Jha, S., Kirshner, R. P., et al. (1998) · The Astronomical Journal · doi:10.1086/300499 · Cited by 19,704
Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 High‐Redshift Supernovae
Perlmutter, S., Aldering, G., Goldhaber, G., Knop, R. A., Nugent, P., Castro, P. G., Deustua, S., Fabbro, S., Goobar, A., Groom, D. E., et al. (1999) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/307221 · Cited by 18,062
Self-citationSotiriou, T. P., & Faraoni, V. (2010) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.82.451 · Cited by 4,519
THE CASE FOR A POSITIVE COSMOLOGICAL Λ-TERM
SAHNI, V., & STAROBINSKY, A. (2000) · International Journal of Modern Physics D · doi:10.1142/s0218271800000542 · Cited by 2,767
Carroll, S. M. (2001) · Living Reviews in Relativity · doi:10.12942/lrr-2001-1 · Cited by 2,650
Metadata
- Authors
- Perlmutter, S., Aldering, G., Valle, M. D., Deustua, S., Ellis, R. S., Fabbro, S., Fruchter, A., Goldhaber, G., Groom, D. E., Hook, I. M., Kim, A. G., Kim, M. Y., Knop, R. A., Lidman, C., McMahon, R. G., Nugent, P., Pain, R., Panagia, N., Pennypacker, C. R., Ruiz-Lapuente, P., Schaefer, B., & Walton, N.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 1998-01-01
- Volume
- 391
- Issue
- 6662
- Pages
- 51-54
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2289091855
- Cited by
- 2,544
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 92.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Discovery of a supernova explosion at half the age of the Universe. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/34124
- The paper
- Perlmutter, S., Aldering, G., Valle, M. D., Deustua, S., Ellis, R. S., Fabbro, S., Fruchter, A., Goldhaber, G., Groom, D. E., Hook, I. M., Kim, A. G., Kim, M. Y., Knop, R. A., Lidman, C., McMahon, R. G., Nugent, P., Pain, R., Panagia, N., Pennypacker, C. R., . . . Walton, N. (1998). Discovery of a supernova explosion at half the age of the Universe. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/34124
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
