Word: supernova
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Schmidt's group and a rival team led by Saul Perlmutter, of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, used very similar techniques to make the measurements. They looked for a kind of explosion called a Type Ia supernova, occurring when an aging star destroys itself in a gigantic thermonuclear blast. Type Ia's are so bright that they can be seen all the way across the universe and are uniform enough to have their distance from Earth accurately calculated...
...might have been a bit too hasty. Last week scientists made a powerful case that Einstein's blunder may actually have been another Nobel-worthy prediction. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to find and study a distant supernova--an exploding star-- astronomers from two rival research teams have jointly gathered the strongest evidence yet that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, like a rocket with its throttle wide open. And that means something is pushing...
...existence is becoming hard to dispute. The first hint came a couple of years ago, when two independent teams of astronomers tried to calibrate the cosmic expansion using Type Ia supernovas, a kind of exploding star whose intrinsic brightness is highly consistent. Comparing the known brightness of such a supernova with how bright it appears in the sky gives a good measure of how far away it is--and thus how long ago in cosmic history its light was emitted. Then, by measuring how fast each supernova is moving away from Earth in the overall ballooning of the universe...
Critics argued that there might be a more conventional explanation, such as intergalactic dust, which could contaminate the brightness measurements. But the new observations seem to have closed that loophole. The newly identified supernova went off about 11 billion years ago--about 50% further back in time than the previous record holder. "If the dust were there," says Lawrence Berkeley astrophysicist Peter Nugent, a member of Perlmutter's team and Riess's collaborator on the new research, "the supernova would have been much dimmer than...
...program the Chris Rock Show. She's just wrapped up rehearsals for her appearance on the program to promote Lovers Rock (Epic), her first CD of new music in eight years. That's a lifetime in pop: time enough for the Seattle rock scene to have exploded like a supernova and to have collapsed like a white dwarf, time enough for Britney Spears to have gone from an innocent grade schooler to a stripteasing teen queen, time enough for the rap-rock genre to have bulked up its market muscle like a steroid-popping Bulgarian weight lifter. Time has passed...