Direction Dependent Non-gaussianity in High-z Supernova Data

Abstract

The most detailed constraints on the accelerating expansion of the universe and details of nature of dark energy are derived from the high redshift supernova data, assuming that the errors in the measurements are Gaussian in nature. There is a possibility that there are direction dependent systematics in the data, either due to uncorrected, known physical processes or because there are tiny departures from the cosmological principle, making the universe slightly anisotropic. To investigate this possibility we introduce a statistic based on the extreme value theory and apply it to the gold data set from Riess et al. (2004). Our analysis indicates a systematic, direction dependent non-gaussianity at about one sigma level.