Impressions from Eurocon 2007 (3)

Saturday :

A good lecture on the mysterious "Dark Energy" , which is thought to take up ab0ut 70 % of the Universe . Most of the remaining part of the Universe is "Dark Matter" , so all we can see of the totality is about 5 % of it . A bit scary, isn't it ?
In the presentation we heard that two teams had - at the same time - found some surprising results during surveys of supernovas in the furthest corners of our universe. This particular type of supernova was known (or assumed) to have a rather limited range of luminousity - and a lot of light coming from them - meaning that the distance to them could be estimated with a rather good certainty. Other sources of error (such as dust clouds) could be eliminated, and the result was that the expansion of the universe looks like accelerating in stead of slowing down - as we would expect due to gravity. So what we have is a sort of anti-gravity - but only on very large distances. Later other surveys in different fields gave similar results , so the scientists are rather certain that the effect exists. There is just no clue as to the cause of it. Rather exciting to listen to.

More on the Saturday later ...


Jan from Denmark