Dr. Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the keynote address at the New England Fall Astronomy Festival 2012. The talk is scheduled for Friday, September 21, at 7:30 p.m.
The talk, entitled “Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe,” will cover the expansion of the universe and the intriguing discoveries to which Dr. Filippenko has contributed. The abstract is below.
Dr. Filippenko’s research interests include supernovae and black holes, and he appears frequently on television programs such as the History Channel’s series, The Universe. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 and is the current Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at UC Berkeley.
The abstract from Dr. Filippenko’s talk:
We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the universe is expanding. But observations of very distant exploding stars show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Over the largest distances, the universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive “dark energy”—an idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 but renounced in 1929 as his “biggest blunder.” It stretches the fabric of space itself faster and faster with time, creating a “runaway universe.” But the physical origin and nature of dark energy, which makes up about three quarters of the contents of the universe, is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics.
We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the universe is expanding. But observations of very distant exploding stars show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Over the largest distances, the universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive “dark energy”—an idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 but renounced in 1929 as his “biggest blunder.” It stretches the fabric of space itself faster and faster with time, creating a “runaway universe.” But the physical origin and nature of dark energy, which makes up about three quarters of the contents of the universe, is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics.
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| Dr. Alex Filippenko |
