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Science Café (November 24, 2009)(notes taken by Esther Huang)
On supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, etc
Guest speakers: Dr Christopher Pritchet from the University of Victoria, Dr Philip Langill from the University of Calgary. Dr Langill is director of research at Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. Dr Pritchet is involved in the Legacy Survey, the Galileo Lecture Series, and CANARIE (Canada’s Advanced Research Network).
The topics which they touched on included the arguments for and against dark energy and dark matter. You’d be at the cutting edge of astrophysics if you grasped these concepts. Einstein supported the steady-state theory, but this is rejected by most current thinkers. The notion of branes, multidimensional universes, and interface of cosmology and theoretical physics got a good working out at this session of the Science Café. See what you missed? You wouldn’t, for example, have to read Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages to see the current state of the standard model of particle physics.
Supernovae were discussed and related to great extinction events on earth. Is there a connection or isn’t there? The relative frequency and enormous brightness of these stellar explosions allow them to be yardsticks for cosmological evolution and a measure of expansion of the universe itself. In recent years, we’ve discovered that expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down. In the long run, this may be the single most important fact we’ve learned in the last hundred years.
The fabric of space itself is not energy-neutral, but rather contains a force or disposition which allows what we call matter to exist. Whence discussion of the Higgs Boson and the efforts at the LHC to discover same.
Dark matter hasn’t stopped the expansion of the universe, and dark energy isn’t necessarily speeding it up. The issues relate to cosmology, because at a very early age, the energy of the universe was so great that gravity was indistinguishable from electromagnetism, the weak force and strong force. The relative ubiquity of hydrogen would be very different – and we likely wouldn’t exist – if the early history of the cosmos had been even slightly different from what it was. We can trace cosmological history by studying particle physics and analyze the latter by examining the former. They all come together.
Learn more about all scientific subjects by turning up at the Science Café. Check our events calendar for date and time.
