Dark Days for Dark Energy?

Sky and Telescope: "Most astrophysics papers sink into the ponds of academia and hardly make a ripple. Others spawn tidal waves. The latest cosmological tsunami was triggered on March 14th, when Edward ('Rocky') Kolb (Fermilab), Sabino Matarrese (University of Padova, Italy), Alessio Notari (McGill University, Canada), and Antonio Riotto (National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Italy) posted a terse, four-page paper on arxiv.org, an online bulletin board that's rapidly taking the place of established journals. The paper invokes the 25-year-old inflation theory to explain away dark energy — a mysterious force that astronomers have recently embraced to explain why the universe's expansion is accelerating. Dark energy has become widely accepted as the main ingredient in today's cosmic soup. Arguing that 'there is no dark energy,' as Kolb says, is as heretical today as was advocating for its existence (in the form of Albert Einstein's cosmological constant) a decade ago. Thus it's no surprise that weblogs and university hallways are buzzing with the news of dark energy's possible demise."