Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt: The Accelerating Universe

THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT.

We regret that, because of the very high demand for tickets, we cannot add any more names to the waiting list for this event.

----

Australia's 2011 Nobel Laureate, Professor Brian Schmidt, will describe the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1998 two teams of astronomers were tracing how the universe had expanded during its history. They expected to find that the expansion was slowing down. But instead, they found it was speeding up. This shocking discovery overturned astronomers' ideas about the history and fate of the universe.

The expansion must be caused by something. Astronomers have called it Dark Energy, and it seems to make up more than 70% of the cosmos. But what is it, really?

Professor Brian Schmidt (Australian National University), who led one of the astronomy teams, will describe the groundbreaking discovery and explain how astronomers track the universe's history back more than 13 billion years -- and what they think its future will be.

This talk is presented by the Australian Astronomical Observatory, Australia's national optical observatory.