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ASOW 2012/08/26: The Discovery of the Accelerating Universe

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 12:36 am
by owlice
The Discovery of the Accelerating Universe
Presenter: Dr. Rob Knop
Professor of Physics, Quest University, Canada

In 1998, two teams of astronomers observing supernovae discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. The speaker, Dr. Knop, was on one of the two teams, working with Saul Perlmutter. In this talk, he describes just how it is that you can measure the expansion history of the Universe by observing distant exploding stars, and what surprising things they saw in the results that indicated the expansion of the Universe was in fact accelerating. At the end, he’ll briefly mention some things about “dark energy,” the mysterious substance that is causing this surprising universal acceleration.

This talk was given in Second Life in November, 2011; it had been previously presented in April, 2009.

Files also available here: http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/T ... g_Universe