Observing Distant Type IA Supernovae with the ESO VLT

The discovery of the accelerating universe through observations of distant Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) was one of the most exciting scientific discoveries of the past decade. The acceleration is apparently driven by a mysterious 'dark' energy which overcomes the gravitational pull of matter. One of the best ways of constraining the nature of the dark energy is to build a larger, better-observed sample of distant SNe Ia over a wide range of redshifts. The Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) has been using ESO and other telescopes to do just that and, in this article, we give an overview of the data we have collected thus far and we present some preliminary results.