Riess shared this year's prize with with fellow American Saul Perlmutter and the Australian Brian Schmidt for the discovery, back in 1998, that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
When it's bolted onto the Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tolodo Observatory in Chile next month the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera will survey some 300 million galaxies in the southern sky, measuring the speed at which they are moving apart with phenomenal accuracy, and giving the best description yet of the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
The list of top discoveries made with Hubble reads like the hit parade of astronomy: a mysterious new "dark energy" causing the accelerating expansion of the universe, distances to other galaxies, the supermassive black holes at their centers, the age of the universe, planet formation around other stars, searches for signs of extraterrestrial life -- and the list goes on.
The explanation for this may lie in the enigmatic "dark energy" that scientists know so little about but which is said to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Great 'cosmic nothingness' found
Switchback after switchback finally leads to the telescope itself, where Annis, a Fermilab astrophysicist and colleagues, have been fine-tuning the attached digital camera that offers the next best hope in answering questions about the true nature of dark energy responsible for the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the observable universe.
Her work uses cosmic gravitational lensing to measure dark energy in the universe in order to help understand how the Universe appears to be accelerating in its expansion.
However, over the past decade detailed observations have shown that the Universe appears actually to be accelerating in its expansion.
The puzzling finding in 1999 that the universe's expansion seems to be accelerating was based on observations of a few dozen supernovae.
应用推荐