Response to: "Isotropic deceleration and near-zero baseline acceleration in Pantheon+ supernovae: new arguments in the dark energy debate''

Abstract

Ray et al. [1] have claimed that the acceleration of the Hubble expansion rate inferred from Type Ia supernovae in the Pantheon+ catalogue "is equally strong in the CMB dipole ($q_m = + 1.45$) and anti-dipole hemispheres ($+ 1.55$), directly contradicting the SRS26 anisotropy argument". Here SRS26 refers to our analysis [2] which showed that "locally $q_0$ has a strong dipole anisotropy aligned approximately with the bulk flow, and only a small monopole component remains at distances exceeding a few hundred Mpc". We find that these authors confused Equatorial with Galactic coordinates, thereby getting the CMB dipole direction wrong. Hence their conclusion is baseless.