ACT Branch
The November 2009 Meeting
The last in this year's series of public lectures marking the International Year of Astronomy
Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Cosmos: Einstein's Blunder Undone
| Speaker | Professor Robert Kirshner
Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University |
| Time | Monday 16th of November 2009 6.00pm (refreshments available from 5.30pm) |
| Location | Dunbar Physics Lecture Theatre (PHYS T), Building 39 The Australian National University |
Recent observations of exploding stars discovered halfway across the universe reveal an astonishing fact: the expansion of the Universe is speeding up! Apparently, the universe is dominated by a mysterious "dark energy" that drives cosmic acceleration. The dark energy may be a modern form of the "cosmological constant" created by Einstein in 1917, but abandoned by Einstein in the 1930s. Robert P. Kirshner, a distinguished astronomer and teacher at Harvard University, explains this astonishing new picture of the universe in a lively, richly illustrated presentation, drawing on his own first-hand account of the discovery.
Robert P. Kirshner is Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University. An author of over 250 scientific publications, Kirshner has also written for National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, Natural History, and Scientific American magazines and is a frequent public speaker on science. His award-winning popular-level book The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos is now in paperback and has been translated into 4 languages. At Harvard, Kirshner teaches a large undergraduate course for students who are not concentrating in the sciences called The Energetic Universe. Kirshner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He recently finished a term as President of the American Astronomical Society. Kirshner received the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. In 2007, Kirshner and his colleagues of the High-Z Supernova Team (led by Professor Brian Schmidt of the ANU and including many of Kirshner's former students and postdocs) shared in the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.