Exploding stars tell us a lot about the expansion of the universe, proving some of Albert Einstein?s theories and winning one Baltimore astrophysicist part of a million-dollar prize.
Adam Reiss of Baltimore?s Johns Hopkins? Space Telescope Science Institute, along with two other astrophysicists received the Shaw Prize in astronomy for their discovery eight years ago that a mysterious “dark energy” is behind an ever-faster expansion of the universe.
“We expected to find that the expansion rate would be slowing down as the gravity of the whole universe would retard that expansion,” Reiss said. “Instead we found that it was accelerating, and that was a big surprise.”
Their work implies “in the simplest interpretation that the energy density of space is nonvanishing even in the absence of any matter and radiation,” according to the Shaw Foundation.
The Shaw Prize consists of three annual prizes: astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences, each prize bearing a monetary award of $1 million U.S. This will be the third year that the Prize has been awarded. The Shaw Foundation is the brain child of Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong movie and television producer.
Scientists really don?t know where that energy comes from or what it is. NASA is now collecting competitive ideas for a new satellite telescope that can track down and measure dark energy to try and answer some of those questions, though that may be years away from construction.
Reiss and his colleagues discovered dark energy by observing supernovae across the universe through the Hubble Space Telescope. They measured the distance of the exploding stars by their brightness in the sky, and their speed by something called the doppler effect. “It changes the color of the light of the supernova towards the red the faster it?s moving away,” Reiss said.
Using these techniques, astronomers can to observe supernovae that occured billions of years apart, he said.
