[anigbrowl]

My takeaway from the summary article (not having looked at the underlying papers yet, and being unable to properly evaluate their claims anyway), is that they've found a sufficiently good correlation between data on black holes and expansion to say likely related and that Einstein's cosmological constant hypothesis was basically correct.

If validated this could be quite significant because physicists (starting with Einstein himself) had basically thrown the idea out until 25 years ago and spent most of their energy on looking for a better theory. Being able to treat CC as a fact would probably open up new horizons of both theory and technology. My understanding is that the biggest theoretical consequence of an ever-accelerating expansion is that eventually spacetime itself disappears in an event known as 'the big rip' in which everything down tot he atomic level flies apart, as opposed to the big crunch in which everything smushes together.

In conclusion, we need to invest billions in new instrumentation to give us answers to questions that are too abstract to have any foreseeable practical implications, unless you want to deal with a small army of very determined nerds that might otherwise turn their attention to building 'interesting' new weapons.