There is a radical new paper in the December 19 issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that claims Dark Energy does not exist and the universe is not accelerating, I don't know if it's right or not but it's certainly interesting. It says recent observation show that the universe is lumpier than previously thought, and clocks run slower in a gravitational field, so a clock in the Milky Way, where there's a lot of matter nearby and thus in a strong gravitational field, would run about 35% slower than a clock that was in one of the larger Cosmic Voids where there is little matter nearby and therefore is in a weak gravitational field. Therefore for us in the Milky Way it would look like the void was getting larger at an accelerating rate.
David Wiltshire, the leader of the study said "Our findings show that we do not need dark energy to explain why the universe appears to expand at an accelerating rate. Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in."> Universe doesn't exist. "Universe" is just an idea in consciousness.