Extra Credit: Dr. Adam Riess

I was recently given the opportunity to hear the insights from Dr. Adam Riess, about the fact that “The Universe looks static…but it’s not!” We were introduced by the fact that the universe is not only expanding, as we all knew was happening, but that it is doing it more rapidly than before, and this may be due to the components of the dark energy Dr. Riess talks about.

"The Universe looks static...but it's not!"

Dr. Riess also talked about the erroneous number that was given to the Earth’s age of 2.2 billion years, when as he states, there are things on Earth that date older than 2.2 billion years. This date was later established to be a lot more different than the mentioned number, since as he mentioned there are species that date to have lived more than 2.2 billion years ago. This example was given by him due to the fact that while making his research he encountered the fact that something that was stated by Einstein, was wrong, and he and his team were about to uncover the real answer.

During the conference we were explained the way in which this expansion is measured using a sound mechanism for the distance of the galaxies and a formula for velocity for the measure of how far the galaxies have moved.  Another fact brought up by Dr. Riess is the way in which they found out if the Universe was accelerating was by placing a telescope in an assigned position and taking a picture, some time later they looked at the same position and took a picture and as they compared all the pictures they took through time, they were encountered with the fact that new supernovae appeared in a surprisingly increased rate revealing an accelerating Universe.

Publications by Dr. Adam Riess: http://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/Publications.htm