Star power. Saul Perlmutter (left), Brian Schmidt (center), and Adam Riess share this year's Nobel Prize in physics.
Credit: LBNL, ANU, JHU
Posted on 10/07/2011 9:35:53 PM PDT by neverdem
Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. At the time, many scientists expected that the gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to slow down the expansion. Today, researchers from both teams shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that dramatic observation, which has changed the conceptual landscape in cosmology, astronomy, and particle physics.
Half of the $1.45 million prize will go to Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project. The other half will be shared by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, who led the High-z Supernova Search Team, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on High-z. "I'm really happy for them," says Yannick Mellier of the Institute for Astrophysics of Paris. "It's a huge discovery that has impact in all of physics."
Both teams traced the expansion of the universe back through time using stellar explosions called type Ia supernovae. Because all such supernovae explode with essentially the same brightness, astronomers can use them as "standard candles": They can tell how far away a supernova is by measuring its apparent brightness from Earth. They can also tell how long ago the stellar bomb went off by measuring how much its light has been stretched to longer, redder wavelengths by the expansion of space. Using different supernovae, both teams found that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. "We thought we must be making some mistake," Schmidt says. "But the mistake refused to go away."
Other evidence soon bolstered the case for the accelerating expansion and some sort of "dark energy" to power it. A few years later, measurements of the afterglow of the big bang—the so-called cosmic microwave background—indicated that 70% of the stuff in the universe had to be dark energy. Studies of clusters of galaxies show that their growth has slowed over the 14-billion-year age of the universe, as if space-stretching dark energy were impeding it.
Cosmologists, astrophysicists, and particle physicists must still explain what "dark energy" is. Much effort focuses on how the density of dark energy changes as space expands. If dark energy is an inherent part of space, the density should remain constant. If dark energy is something in space, then it should become more dilute. The question comes down to using further astronomical observations to determine whether a single parameter in the cosmological "equation of state" is exactly -1, indicating dark energy is part of space, or something like -0.93, indicating that dark energy is something in space. Currently, the value of this parameter is consistent with -1 with an uncertainty of about 10%.
Will scientists ever know what dark energy is? "That's not a sure thing," says Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. "The problem is that you can't prove by observations that a parameter is exactly minus one."
Each team comprised about 20 scientists. "This is another example of what a shame it is that the Nobels can't recognize teams," says Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "It sends the wrong signal." White notes that Robert Kirshner of Harvard University was the thesis adviser of Schmidt and Riess and got them started on the prizewinning project.
With reporting by Daniel Clery.
All they have to do is interview Helen Thomas...
ping
So the universe is going to hell faster than we thought.
Discovery of cosmic handbasket yields team Nobel prize...
The beginning of wisdom is being able to make intelligent statements like this.
The elephant in the room IS.....
The Universe is Expanding into WHAT?... i.e. something bigger?..
Note: You buy them books they eat the pages..
It doesn’t really matter what it’s expanding into. It’s a conceptual framework. A trick of open versus closed spaces, in a mathematical sense.
The entire concept of gravity as something that “pulls” mass together is being shown to be wrong. Backwards.
Empty space as we seem to know it is actually the most dense part of the universe. It’s compacted and compressed, under enormous pressure,
What we call “mass” is the least dense part. It gets pushed together (or better said towards each other) by the “empty” space.
Just like bubbles rising in a beer. It’s a kind of surface tension in three dimensions.
Sakharov was right.
The big bang didn’t “happen”. The big bang is happening.
Take a saucepan or like a pressure cooker that you can seal.
Just for the hey of it, make it a clear one you can see through. Fill it halfway with water.
Put it on the stove. It will start to boil, but all the “air” above it will still seem clear. It is normal air but with alot of water vapor mixed in, under huge pressure.
Now release the spigot.
You will see a huge cloud of steam emerge. stuff which seems solid but is really just stuff that condensed out of something way more dense.
That’s what mass is. We are the “steam” of the big bang. And the expansion will continue forever. We can never gather up a;; the vapor and compress it back down, realize we are not talking truly about water vapor, we are talking the fundamental stuff that matter is made of.
I came up with equations in the early 90’s that predicted:
The mass of the universe is increasing linearly with the time
The volume of the universe is increasing in a cubic relation to the time
So
All we know is getting bigger, but really evaporating before our eyes
And the numbers I was working with at the time predicted that the “age” (if you can define it that way) of the universe was 18 billion years, with an average density of about one proton mass per 10,000 cubic centimeters.
But I might be wrong.
[ The big bang didn’t “happen”. The big bang is happening. ]
IF eternity future is possible, why not, eternity PAST?....
Linear time may be a limited concept..
i.e. in the box thinking..
The question of whether time is eternal or ending is the same question as to whether the universe is straight or curved.
Zeno’s paradox.
Walk halfway to your mailbox. It will take time.
From there, walk half the distance again. It will take more time.
Keep going.
It will take forever.
Whether the universe is finite (closed and curved) versus whether it is infinite (open and flat) is a question that has no mathematical meaning because straight lines in curved space turn out to be exactly mathematically equivalent to curved lines in straight space.
If the expansion is accelerating, what happens when it
reaches 186,214(?) miles/second???
Ok...I get that part...but doesn’t that presuppose a static amount of mass?
OK, I’ll byte {sic} what does PLAID stand for??
I thought it went poof, and started all over again with a big bang,
PLAID, Please Look Ahead, Imminent Destruction
BTW, what's the little red X in the box?
I marvel how quickly one can pull up a relevant picture, unless, of course, you had the picture and was waiting for an opportunity to use it. Happy to oblige.
Soooo you don’t know either!?...
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