This Saturday : “The Discovery of the Accelerating Universe” in Second Life
“Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy”, in association with MICA (www.mica-vw.org)
Saturday, April 4, 10AM SLT
http://slurl.com/secondlife/StellaNova/213/210/32
The Discovery of the Accelerating Universe
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, I will describe just how it is that you can measure the expansion history of the Universe by observing distant exploding stars, and what surprising things we saw in our results that indicated to us that the expansion of the Universe was in fact accelerating. At the end, I’ll briefly mention some things about “dark energy,” the mysterious substance that is causing this surprising universal acceleration.