http://www.thepunch.com.au/author-bios/niall-byrne/ Niall Byrne is a science writer with Science in Public, a Melbourne-based team of science communicators. en Copyright 2012 The Punch penberthyd@newsltd.com.au penberthyd@newsltd.com.au Sat, 26 May 2012 20:00:49 +0000 Sat, 26 May 2012 20:00:49 +0000 Politics, opinion, world news, sports news, latest news, views, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Nathan Rees, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Garrett, Barnaby Joyce, Australian, federal politics, opinion polls, election, The Punch, thepunch, punch ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 15 http://www.thepunch.com.au/images/punch-logo-rss.png http://www.thepunch.com.au/ 144 70 Politics, political opinion, world news, sports news and the latest news and views updated live, daily on The Punch - Australia's best conversation. Search The Punch keywords http://www.thepunch.com.au/search/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-nobel-subject-life-the-universe-and-everything/ By studying exploding stars, an Australian astrophysicist and his colleagues worked out that the Universe is not just expanding, but expanding faster and faster, thanks to dark energy. They pretty much single-handedly made us realise that instead of a Big Crunch, the Universe is just going to… gradually dissipate. Woah. We asked science writer Niall Byrne to talk us through the mind boggliness of it all. Yesterday morning the Nobel Prize for Physics committee sat down in Stockholm to consider the 2011 prize. By noon they had decided to give the prizes to the leaders of two teams of reseachers who together had come up with a crazy result that broke our understanding of the nature of the Cosmos – that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. An accelerating universe was a crazy result that was hard to accept. Yet, two teams, racing neck and neck, simultaneously came to the same conclusion. Their discovery led to the idea of an expansion force, dubbed dark energy. And it suggests that the fate of the universe is to just keep expanding, faster and faster. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Niall Byrne) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-nobel-subject-life-the-universe-and-everything/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-nobel-subject-life-the-universe-and-everything/#item6858 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:00:13 +0000 Niall Byrne | Author bios | The Punch