An impressive amount of different astrophysical data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat Universe undergoing today a phase of accelerated expansion. The nature of the dark energy dominating the energy content of the Universe is still unknown, and a lot of different scenarios are viable candidates to explain cosmic acceleration. Most of the methods employed to test these cosmological models are essentially based on distance measurements to a particular class of objects. A different method, based on the lookback time to galaxy clusters and the age of the Universe, is used here. In particular, we constrain the characterizing parameters of three classes of dark energy cosmological models to see whether they are in agreement with this kind of data, based on time measurements rather than distance observations.

• Received 16 June 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.70.123501