Physical evidence for dark energy

The authors present measurements of the angular cross-correlation between luminous red galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the cosmic microwave background temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. They find a statistically significant achromatic positive correlation between these two data sets, which is consistent with the expected signal from the late Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect. they do not detect any anti-correlation on small angular scales as would be produced from a large Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, although they do see evidence for some SZ effect for their highest redshift samples. Assuming a flat universe, their preliminary detection of the ISW effect provides independent physical evidence for the existence of dark energy.