I wonder if its a result of the topography of spacetime? Like, if we were to assume the universe is toroidial, and then superimpose a coordinate system over the torus where each point on the grid is one Plank-legnth from its neighbors, I wonder if the distance between grid squares would look bigger at the outside edge of the torus than in the central funnel? If Earth were near the center, then when we look outward/backward we'd observe objects apparent acceleration outward even though from the perspective of those objects themselves they are jumping from grid square to grid square at a constant rate.

I wonder what we will see once physics has really understood all this dark matter and dark energy stuff.

I guess they will then talk about those like when we talk about pre germ theory medicine, when people believed that "bad air" causes sickness, and vermin was "created" by dirt.

Found signs

Is this a "best fit" sort of result or an actual significant measurement on the equation of state?

String theorists have conjectured that the exclusion of a (positive) cosmological constant explanation for dark energy is a prediction of string theory. If this result holds up, that line of research seems quite interesting.