Scientists

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.

Continue reading "A Nobel subject: Life, the Universe and Everything" »