Supernova Study Reveals Details of Universes Expansion |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Sunday, 04 December 2005 21:01 |
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The Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) team, is studying hundreds of type 1a supernovae to plot the history of the Universes expansion as precisely as possible.
After analysing 70 supernovae, the team has concluded that the findings fit the theory that space has dark energy, and that the rate of the universes expansion is changing with time in the way that would be expected if there were a cosmological constant.
The team is monitoring large chunks of the sky at a time, using the 3.6 metre Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) on top of Hawaiis Mount Kea. About 200 supernovae have already been surveyed. After the CFHT locates a supernova and measures its brightness, a larger telescope records its red-shift.
The teams observations show that dark energys repulsive force has not changed by more than 20 percent since the universe was half its current size, about 8 billion years ago.
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