Last night at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History , Dr. Alex Filippenko of Berkely gave a lecture entitled Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe. Filippenko is the second speaker of the Las Cumbres Observatory Lecture Series, in partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Museum of Natural History.
(taken from the UCSB Lecture website)
In 1998, observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) provided intriguing evidence that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down due to gravity as expected. Today, new and completely independent observations strongly support this amazing conclusion. Over the largest scales of space, our Universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive "dark energy" of unknown origin, stretching the very fabric of space itself faster and faster with time.
A UCSB CCS Physics program alumnus, Alex Filippenko received his PhD in Astronomy from Caltech in 1984 and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1986. He has coauthored about 500 scientific publications and has won numerous prizes for his research. He has won the top teaching awards at Berkeley, and in 2006 was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. He has produced a 96-lecture astronomy video course with The Teaching Company and has coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook.
UCSB Flyer (pdf)
