UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko, a prominent member of an international team that first reported these striking findings, will discuss their implications on Tuesday, October 26, in a public lecture at UC Santa Cruz.
Admission is free.
When Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is actually expanding, Einstein renounced the cosmological constant, calling it the biggest blunder of his career. Now, however, Filippenko's group and another independent team of researchers have found strong evidence that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating with time. They based this startling conclusion on observations of very distant supernovae, exploding stars that shine very brightly and can be used as beacons for measuring great distances in the universe. In order to explain these findings, cosmologists have revived Einstein's cosmological constant, a positive force countering the effect of gravity and propelling the continued expansion of the universe. The implications are that the universe will expand forever and that space is geometrically flat on large scales.