The Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Australian National University
Thursday, January 31st 2013, 18:00
Stephen Leacock Building, Leacock Auditorium (room 132)
The Accelerating Universe
In 1998 two teams traced back the expansion of the universe over billions
of years and discovered that it was accelerating, a startling discovery that
suggests that more than 70% of the cosmos is contained in a previously unknown
form of matter, called Dark Energy. The 2011 Nobel Laureate for Physics,
Brian Schmidt, leader of the High-Redshift Supernova Search Team, will
describe this discovery and explain how astronomers have used observations
to trace our universe's history back more than 13 billion years, leading
them to ponder the ultimate fate of the cosmos.
Friday, February 1st, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, Keys Auditorium (room 112)
Type 1a Supernovae, The Accelerating Cosmos and Dark
Energy
Type Ia supernovae remain one of Astronomy's most precise tools for measuring
distances in the Universe. I will describe the cosmological application of
these stellar explosions, and chronicle how they were used to discover an
accelerating Universe in 1998 - an observation which is most simply explained
if more than 70% of the Universe is made up of some previously undetected
form of ‘Dark Energy’. Over the intervening 13 years,
a variety of experiments have been completed, and even more proposed to
better constrain the source of the acceleration. I will review the range
of experiments, describing the current state of our understanding of the
observed acceleration, and speculate about future progress in understanding
Dark Energy.
|