July Lecture: The Hubble Space Telescope and the Hubble Constant
Fri 10 Jul 09 8:00pm - 9:30pm
Location: Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A, University of Melbourne (adjacent to the School of Physics)
Presented by Professor Jeremy Mould, School of Physics, University of Melbourne
Missed this lecture? See it here.
The Hubble Space Telescope has provided the biggest improvement in optical telescope resolution since Galileo. Following the First Servicing Mission in 1993, when NASA astronauts corrected the erroneous mirror shape, a team of 20 astronomers began a project to measure the Hubble Constant, which tells us how fast the Universe is expanding. This involved the measurement of distances to some 20 galaxies within 60 million light years and the calibration of distance measuring methods to much larger distances. The Hubble Constant measured by the team implies that the Universe is 13 billion years old. For this work Wendy Freedman, Robert Kennicutt, and Jeremy Mould shared the 2009 Gruber Prize in cosmology. The astronauts have just successfully completed the Fourth Servicing Mission, installing new instruments on the nearly 20 year old Hubble Space Telescope.