This achievement is yet another example of how painstaking, imaginative, basic research can advance humankind's knowledge of our universe, with the promise of impacts on our lives that we can only begin to imagine. Just as important, the Lab environment allows research to continue over a long time. We worked ten years before we finally got the answers to our questions. Thus how bright they appear reveals their distance. By comparing the distance of these exploding stars with the redshifts of their home galaxies, researchers can calculate how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history.
Good results depend upon observing many type Ia supernovae, both near and far.
Before the Supernova Cosmology Project employed search techniques developed during the first five years of its existence, finding supernovae was a haphazard proposition, which made it difficult to secure telescope time to observe them. To get telescope time, you had to guarantee you were going to find a supernova. But without time on a major telescope, it was impossible to show that they were there, and that we could find them. Each contains roughly a thousand distant galaxies. Three weeks later the same patches are imaged again.