WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: The Accelerating Universe: a Decade On

SPEAKER: Professor Joshua A. Frieman ,

TIME: Thursday Mar. 19, 2009 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 in Olin Physical Laboratory

A decade ago, two teams studying distant supernovae discovered that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up, at odds with the expectation that gravity would gradually slow it down. Cosmic acceleration could arise from the 'repulsive gravity' of Dark Energy--for example, the energy of the vacuum--or it may signal that Einstein's General Relativity breaks down on cosmological scales and must be replaced. In this talk, I will review the history and present evidence for cosmic acceleration and what it has revealed about dark energy, discuss the various ideas that have been put forward to explain acceleration, and describe the key observational probes and experiments that will help shed light on this enigma in the coming years.