to saul perlmutter brian schmidt and adam riess. the idea behind their research is quite simple objects look less bright the further away they are you have your special it's well consider these 2 t.v. lights placed at different distances from me the brightness of the candles remains constant if i measure the brightness of the more distant one it will seem less bright than the narrow one we use this kind of method in astronomy. when we find objects that maintain constant brightness in our case supernovae which are exploded stars but appear less bright then we know that their further away that lets us measure distances in the universe and work out its rate of expansion. the underlying assumption or discovery is that some kinds of supernovae have a known and constant brightness and therefore serve as reference values or standard candles. we can see this new paper claims that the principle of standard candles doesn't work and that the distance supernovae look less bright for other reasons we don't think that claim is correct for various