dark energy

Of Nobel laureates in physics today, was largely a matter of when, not if. When shaken the three winners and their teams again declared in 1998 that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating, cosmology at its core: their findings and said the universe does not end with a bang, but a whimper.

The question is why - a mysterious force of dark energy, which represents about three-quarters of the energy mass of the universe as a whole - is one of the biggest questions in modern science.
Won Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Rees for their discovery of the common universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Used ground and space telescopes to map the far supernovae type Ia, and found these stars looked pale exploded than it should be. And use international accounting standards and the type of standard candles because of the brightness, astronomers know, which is consistent too, can be used to measure the distance to us.

However, measurements showed that these standard candles were not bright correctly, and they were fading. It is happening, and can be easily blamed on the technology, or perhaps accounts. But both teams - and found the same thing - the Supernova Cosmology Project Supernova Search Team High-Z. The data showed that these standard candles were moving away at an accelerating rate.

This was the startling facts. Everyone knows, since Edwin Hubble, who was being in the universe as a result of the remote away from the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. But in order to be accelerated? It means something else was at work, more power mysterious and strange than anyone thought. No one knows what this force, but after another decade of accounts, physicists know that they make up about 74 percent of the universe. "We call it dark energy to express their ignorance," Perlmutter said in a lecture I attended in 2008.

Work is exciting in itself, but these are also some physicists of the evangelists of science will meet the best young people. Perlmutter, 52, is the language of animation and enthusiasm, and the exact type of person you want to interpret phrases such as "baryonic oscillation" the great and fade. He has continued his research and a dark energy leading scientists in the laboratory of Lawrence Berkeley National. He wants to be building an observatory supernova, the supernova acceleration probe (SNAP), such as the Works Progress Administration Project: "Everyone is talking about dark energy, but no one does anything about it," he said at the time.

Reese, who is only 41, is the world of astronomy at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and professor at Johns Hopkins. He also holds a grant of the MacArthur Foundation genius and many other honors for work in his cosmology.

Conducted Schmidt, who is 44 and works at the Australian National University, and some calculations made Reyes' results.

I still have Perlmutter business card on my desk, because this talk is one of the reasons I wanted to write about things such as redness and the cosmological constant. These are the basic things - the nature of the eternal and the future of everything, still vague and mysterious, but almost, because of Perlmutter, Schmidt and Reese, can really know.

"The findings of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 helped to uncover that the universe is largely unknown to science," wrote the Nobel Assembly. "All things are possible again."