Free Public Lecture: Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Cosmos: Einstein's Blunder Undone
Wed 18 Nov 09 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Theatre A Elisabeth Murdoch Building - No booking required.
Presented by Prof. Robert P. Kirshner, Clowes Professor of Science, Harvard University, 2009 Selby Fellow
Recent observations of exploding stars discovered halfway across the universe reveal an astonishing fact: the expansion of the Universe is speeding up! Apparently, the universe is dominated by a mysterious "dark energy" that drives cosmic acceleration. The dark energy may be a modern form of the "cosmological constant" created by Einstein in 1917, but abandoned by Einstein in the 1930s. Robert P. Kirshner, a distinguished astronomer and teacher at Harvard University, explains this astonishing new picture of the universe in a lively, richly illustrated presentation, drawing on his own first-hand account of the discovery.