SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Professor Brian Schmidt
ARC Federation Fellow, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University

Brian Schmidt was raised in the USA, and received degrees in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona. He completed his master's and PhD in astronomy at Harvard University. Brian formed the High-Z Supernovae Search team, a group of 20 astronomers on five continents who used distant exploding stars to trace the expansion of the Universe back in time. This group's discovery of an accelerating Universe was named Science magazine's breakthrough of the year for 1998. Brian was awarded the inaugural Malcolm McIntosh award for achievement in the physical sciences in 2000, and the Australian Academy of Science’s Pawsey Medal in 2001. Most recently, he was co-awarded the international 2006 Shaw and 2007 Gruber Prizes. Brian leads Mt Stromlo’s effort to build the SkyMapper telescope, a new facility that will provide a comprehensive digital map of the southern sky from ultraviolet through near infrared wavelengths.

The accelerating universe

In 1998 two teams used exploding stars known as supernovae to discover the Universe was accelerating. Understanding the cause of the cosmic acceleration is now one of physics’ biggest questions. I will describe how exploding stars were used to trace back the expansion of the Universe more than 10 billion years and uncover the acceleration. I will discuss why these observations may suggest that more than 70 per cent of the Universe is made up of a dark energy that permeates the cosmos, and look at how astronomers and physicists are trying to further unravel this cosmic mystery.