  The most detailed constraints on the accelerating expansion of the universe
and details of nature of dark energy are derived from the high redshift
supernova data, assuming that the errors in the measurements are Gaussian in
nature. There is a possibility that there are direction dependent systematics
in the data, either due to uncorrected, known physical processes or because
there are tiny departures from the cosmological principle, making the universe
slightly anisotropic. To investigate this possibility we introduce a statistic
based on the extreme value theory and apply it to the gold data set from Riess
et al. (2004). Our analysis indicates a systematic, direction dependent
non-gaussianity at about one sigma level.
