there's a battle going on out there that
will determine the fate of the universe
it's a battle between two great forces
one trying to pull the universe together
and the other trying to push it apart we
travel to when time began to find the
universe in a beach ball thanks for
passing me the universe we go down a
mine to look for what's pulling the
universe together you're an astronomer
someone says you don't want two thirds
of the universe is made from that era
take and we look for what's pushing it
apart by searching for exploding stars
finally I'm Alan Alda join me a
Scientific American frontiers ventures
out into the dark side of the universe
this program was made possible by the
National Science Foundation America's
investment in the future
and by contributions to your PBS station
from viewers like you
thank you once we thought our world was
the center of the universe and today we
know we're on a minor if privileged
planet circling an average star in an
inconspicuous spot in an unremarkable
galaxy that's just one of billions of
galaxies occupying a universe that
stretches farther than we can see even
with our biggest telescopes but in the
last few years
telescopes like these here in Chile have
shown us that we're even less at the
center of our universe than we could
have ever imagined you and I in these
rocks and the Sun that shines on us and
the stars the twinkle overhead aren't
even built of the same stuff that most
of the universe is made of and there's a
mysterious force out there in space that
literally comes out of nowhere it's a
force that seems to be pushing the
universe apart faster and faster until
one day everything out there beyond our
own little solar system will simply
disappear into blackness our universe
and our place in it just got a whole lot
weirder staring at a patch of sky 1/10
the diameter of the moon the Hubble
Space Telescope recently peered farther
out into our universe and farther back
in time than any telescope before for a
million seconds it gazed gathering light
from 10,000 galaxies the smallest and
faintest are some 13 billion light-years
away meaning their light has been
traveling toward us since shortly after
the universe began
what gave birth to these first galaxies
is one of the great mysteries of our
cosmos but astronomers now suspect that
matter we can see in the universe
including ourselves resulted from a
titanic struggle between the form of
matter we can't see dark matter and a
force dark energy that we've only
recently detected together dark matter
and dark energy rule our universe and
we're here to wonder about them only
because in their battle for domination
which has gone on for most of eternity
neither has triumphed - one main engine
start and liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket
with the mad spacecraft exploring the
past and future of our universe this was
the launch on June 30th 2001 of a
spacecraft able to look even farther
back in time than the Hubble called w
map its mission was to capture the very
first light of the universe that light
has been traveling toward our own little
corner of the cosmos ever since it was
released from what most astronomers now
agree was the origin of everything we
can see planets
stars
galaxies like our own Milky Way and the
billions of other galaxies that have
been expanding outward since the
beginning that beginning was the Big
Bang a ripping open of space and time
inflating in an instant to become an
unimaginably hot cauldron of energy and
matter it was light escaping from that
cauldron that w map was sent to measure
light now reduced by his journey through
eternity to a faint afterglow called the
cosmic microwave background radiation
what the satellite saw has been mapped
on to something I can comfortably get my
hands around if not yet quite my head
this device this satellite is picking up
this cosmic background microwave
radiation from way back in time right
right from the beginning of the universe
it's actually a direct picture of what
the University used to be like because
it took that light all that time to get
from there to the satellite okay here's
the page they have you have to help me
visualize this okay a lot of us when we
first hear about the Big Bang think of
it like an explosion happening in a
point in space and moving out and then
somewhere we're in bed or something and
a lot of us think when we look back in
time we want to look back to that point
but on the contrary when you look back
in time you're looking in every
direction you're looking all over some
shell exact everywhere you look it's as
far back as you can go how could that be
can you explain that can you give me an
image that helps me grasp that you're
trying to think of an explosion that
happened in one place yeah and instead
the universe was today it doesn't have
any particular Center and it never did
everywhere you were would have gone it
would have been expanding I like to
think of making a loaf of with little
raisins in it and when the raisins when
the bread rises all the raisins are
moving away from all the other raisins
no raisin can really claim that it's in
the center of this expansion any more
than any other fine
the same way we need to think of our
space I know but here's the problem
every time every time one of those
raisins wants to look at another raisin
yeah it feels it can look all the way
across the loaf to a raisin on the other
side but if it looks in the other
direction that sees the baking tin it's
a little bit better that's because the
bread is finite and in an infinite space
if you live in an infinite loaf of bread
there's nothing you can do to tell the
difference the picture of an explosion
and a ball of stuff is I agree that
that's what many people think of but
that's just wrong it's not it's not what
the Big Bang Theory is all about what
the Big Bang Theory is all about is
space itself they can think of it as
being stretchy and it's just constantly
stretching and it's stretching between
every object everywhere so that
everything is getting is getting farther
away from everything else and no matter
where you are and you look out you see a
glow left firmly from your legs and
needs to be it needs to be called the
big taffy pull that would be a better
name almost anything would be a better
day the infinite than the infinite taffy
pull okay well I think you're getting me
closer all right okay what show me what
the implications of that of this mapping
are so what I love about what I really
love about chucks beach ball is that it
represents this very basic fact that
even though space itself may be infinite
we can only see a finite volume it's a
huge volume this is about thirteen
billion light-years in radius but it's
still only finite right so we're in the
center of this and the most distant
thing we can see is this hot glowing
wall of a hydrogen plasma which is
opaque so you know we just can't see
what's on the other side but on the side
of the wall we can see on our beach ball
it's the inner surface the incandescent
plasma just beyond has cooled enough to
go from being uniform and featureless to
having Eddie's and ripples
it was these tiny imperfections that
were imaged by the exquisitely sensitive
eyes of the W map satellite Chuck and
his colleagues have stretched the
contrast here by a factor of a hundred
thousand to prevent it from looking
completely uniform but the Royal
nonetheless these tiny ripples where
some places look hotter of this look
colder and that's just because there was
a tiny bit more stuff in some directions
than in other directions and these
little ripples are extremely important
because it's because of them that were
here you know if you just had something
which was always uniform it would stay
uniformed forever and you would never
make clumps planets and we couldn't be
here talking
to find out more about how those faint
early ripples left over from the Big
Bang became our universe we come here to
the foothills of the Andes in Chile this
region has become home to some of the
world's biggest and most powerful
telescopes lured here by clear skies and
a smooth flow of air off the Pacific
Ocean that reduces atmospheric
turbulence making for what astronomers
call superb seeing this is the site of
one such Observatory Las Campanas run by
the Carnegie Institution of Washington
and the principal research site of an
old friend of frontiers Alan Dressler on
telescopes
thank you that they seem to be - there -
there are twin six and a half meter
telescopes which means they have mirrors
that are about 22 feet across just a
good size and they collect light from
distant stars and galaxies this is where
we do most of our research time ago that
research is focused on the formative
years of the universe at the beginning
we know there was a very simple
distribution of matter was very smooth
it was very simple elements hydrogen and
helium there were no stars just gas how
did the universe go from being deadly
dull with no variation it's a
tremendously complex so that there are
creatures on it they look back and
figure it all out man that's the
fundamental question and this zone this
sort of 3 billion years in - maybe eight
is where most of that complexity grew
and we can see that evolving happening
by this strange ability to look back in
time I mean only in astronomy can you
actually look back and see five million
years ten billion years in the past you
can see the past because it took all
those stories about time machines yeah
it is we got when you were looking at
the light from the stars yeah comes in
and hits that mirror exactly gets
reflected on another mirror that's a
white guy up there the little guy up
there which in turn reflects them the
light through the hole in the black
turret where there is an elevator
diagonal mirror 45 degrees which directs
the light to the instrument when the
light hits that mirror how long has it
been Trevor what for the things that I'm
looking at with Pat tonight the light
has been traveling for about ten billion
years so pretty much the whole wage of
the universe and this is the first thing
it hits after all that so he's got to be
cleaned especially tonight because it's
the first time Alan will be using a
brand new instrument Alan is Pat
McCarthy my science partner here this is
the slickness so if you turn around look
through the light you'll see in what
they affectionately called the walk Pat
has painstakingly cut tiny holes
corresponding to the galaxies he and
Alan planned to study in any area of the
sky that we pick up say a half a degree
across that's what this is looking at
that's the size of the moon there will
really be a hundred thousand galaxies
very faint very distant galaxies and we
have selected in this case 700 of them
we want to look at so we must make sure
that the light from those 700 goes
through the spectrograph but nothing
else
Alan's new instrument doesn't just take
pictures of those distant galaxies it
can read their spectra the redshift in
fact nearly everything we know about
stars and galaxies comes from analyzing
their life with the aid of a prism or
more commonly a device called a
diffraction grating when sunlight or any
light strikes this it's spread by color
into
Oh component colors you can say how much
red light how much green light how much
blue light tells you something about the
temperature of the Sun and the Sun is a
star at 5,000 degrees temperature
produces a lot of yellow light inside
the middle of the spectrum in the most
intense part is yellow-green then we can
see almost with our bare eyes we see red
stars and bluer kind of stars that has
to do with the temperature of the star
basically yeah
here for example in one of the first
images taken with Alan Dressler's new
camera both red stars and blue stars are
visible in the galaxy nearby but in the
spectrographs that astronomers use the
colors of a star can be analysed in much
finer detail than is visible in a
rainbow there are lines at precise
locations across the spectrum that
reveal what a star is made of as well as
its temperature and its size the reason
that's important is different stars
different size last they live a
different amount of time the Sun will
last for 10 billion years it's halfway
through its lifetime a star much more
massive than the Sun might only live for
1 billion years so if we find those we
know that those are young stars they
cannot be any older than 1 billion years
old because they would already be gone
yeah yeah so when I look across our
galaxy I could do one by one I could
tell you what each individual star is
like I could see a star like the Sun all
the way across our galaxy and if I put
together the light from billions of
stars I could see them all the way
across the universe and in that
information is the rate at which new
stars have been born in that galaxy 3
billion years ago 5 billion years ago 7
billion years ago so I begin to build up
a picture of how rapidly were galaxies
turning their gas into stars over their
lifetimes a complete construction
project
at Twilight the Magellan telescopes dome
is opened we need to rotate 0.33 5
degrees plus 0.335
tres tres tres single so how many
galaxies are gonna have their spectra
taken we're going to take spectra of 700
galaxies tonight Semillon yeah that's
probably as many has ever been done I
gotta remember to put in the walk that's
a big mistake if you don't do that you
really blown it this first exposure
using the walk took a half an hour ok so
already we can see some objects that's
encouraging
there's a bright one this is just the
beginning of several months work that
will add up to some 50 to 100 hours of
data but even from these first few
minutes of peering across the universe a
trickle of light has left the signature
of the galaxy and the full fury of
creation so here is a very faint line
that is a very faint galaxy very far
away and here at this one color that
represents probably a hundred photons of
light coming from a place where a
million hot young stars have formed in
that galaxy 10 billion years ago so it's
10 billion years ago an oh well that
made it to us tonight with 100 photons
that's right so this is the first
scientific run you've done yes new
instrument how do you feel is it a good
start it's a good start
I wish we'd seen a lot in the first
exposures but you have to have a lot of
patience if you're gonna do something
really hard but it works the instrument
works it's producing spectrum people
working on this instrument for how long
six years six years took a long time to
build but now it's gonna pay off for us
that payoff will help illuminate one of
the universe's darkest secrets how those
early ripples left from the Big Bang
became the seeds of the stars a vital
clue to that mystery was discovered
because a little girl loved watching the
movement of the stars in the night sky
outside her bedroom window that story
next in the early 1970s Vera Rubin was a
rare young woman in the traditionally
male-dominated world of astronomy I got
interested in astronomy by watching the
stars as they moved outside my window I
had a window that faced north I had a
bed under the window and I could see
during the night that the Stars changed
their positions and that's really what
got me interested in astronomy so I
guess I was always interested in how
things moved
birra decided to look at how stars move
in spiral galaxies like our own Milky
Way as they revolve majestically in
space most astronomers then studying
galaxies were drawn to their centers
where the stars are densest but as a
then shy young graduate student
birra looked instead to where galaxies
trail off into empty space
I had children and I didn't want to
compete with what other people were
doing so I decided to study the outsides
of galaxies what she discovered there
was revolutionary in both senses in our
solar system the planets revolve more
slowly the farther they are from the
gravitational attraction of the Sun
galaxies were assumed to rotate
similarly with stars moving more slowly
the farther they are from the center
instead I found that the stars very far
out we're going just as fast as those
near the center sometimes even faster
sometimes faster sometimes faster and
well beyond where there was no light in
fact I brought I went to my office this
morning and got this here's a Andromeda
which is the largest galaxies largest
spiral near us at our position in our
galaxy which would be like maybe a third
of the way out here we're moving at half
a million miles an hour around the
center of our galaxy did you hardly feel
a wind that's right
and you don't notice it because
everything around us all the stars near
us everything is going just at the same
speed that we are so here are the
velocities of stars and gas all the way
across Newton's laws because this is
where the luminosity is would predict
that the velocities rise and then fall
rapidly so that by the time you get out
to what looks like the edge of the
galaxy the Stars would be moving almost
negligibly very very slowly so what you
see instead is they're moving very very
fast all the way out there so when you
got that information then what what did
you did you think you were wrong or did
you know if you know right
I never I never thought no I had some
crazy ideas and then it shortly settled
that what would what would have to be
was matter that isn't luminous that you
don't see the galaxy has to expect
extend that far out there has to be
something there has to be matter that's
gravitationally accelerating a little
bit of gas that we could see there had
been hints of invisible matter in the
universe before but Vera Rubin startling
discovery confirmed her observations
implied in fact that galaxies are
embedded in immense halos of dark matter
invisible to our telescopes and yet
making up most of the actual mass of
each galaxy including our own the whole
concept of dark matter is enormous it
means that when you're looking at the
sky you're only looking at a few percent
of the gallic of the universe that most
of the universe is invisible to look
into one of the possible sources of this
invisible dark matter we've come to
California and the first mountaintop
Observatory ever built the link
Observatory dating back to 1888 the
founders buried at the base of the
telescope James lek is buried at the
base of the pier here it does anybody
would think about that when you used to
think about it when I was observing a
40-inch down the end of the hall and in
the middle of the night the wind would
come you know whirring through the hall
and you'd hear the clanking of the old
heaters and yeah I was pretty sure he
was coming down to visit
yeah the original telescope here is
still used to look at planets in our own
solar system you can open up the
telescope and work is it but Deborah
Fisher is hunting for planets well
beyond its range in fact for planets
around other stars so this is the little
collecting mirror that we're gonna use
tonight the star light will come down
and hit the mirror and is reflected up
through that trough slides up there and
goes through that hole in the side of
the dome looks like fun right what are
photons to have fun so the light that we
saw the flight path outside left easy
little mechanical things you that's
right like something from Jules Verne
exactly the magic part of our whole
project really is this iodine cell and
now as the star light passes through the
cell the iodine is absorbing starlight
at particular wavelengths and so finally
in the spectrum of the star edged into
the spectrum we have a forest of iodine
lines thousands of them and so it's
essentially like a grid on our spectrum
Deborah is looking for tiny telltale
shifts of a star's signature spectrum
against that fixed grid of iodine lines
a ship that betrays the stars moving
toward and away from us due to a
planet's tugging at it this backward and
forward wobble also reveals the planets
size in orbit the bigger the wobble of
the star Awards doing that the bigger
the the the planet is going around it
and the the faster it it wobbles the the
closer it is that's exactly right okay
okay so in that way you can really tell
us what what's there that's right
Deborah and her colleagues have found
some 70 of the over 100 planet so far
discovered orbiting other Suns
most of these planets are huge and
orbiting fast making their detection
easier Debra's team's most dramatic
discovery attracted the attention of a
fourth-grade class in Moscow Idaho and
when we found this system this first
start with three planets they sent me a
letter you know dear dr. Fischer we've
been reading about this discovery in the
newspaper and we're doing you know scale
models of the solar system with paper
plates and and but we wondered you know
if you name the planets yet because if
you haven't we have a suggestion and so
they said the planet that's that's four
times the mass of Jupiter should be
called for Peter and the one it's two
times the mass of Jupiter should be
called two pidor of course and the
little one that just orbits every four
days should be dinky so the star that
Deborah is observing tonight she's
already looked at some 200 times and
while it used to be thought an unlikely
candidate to have a planet she's now
picking up the faint trace of a wobble
planets are thought to form from discs
of dust and gas that surround the Sun
and it could be that many of the
billions of stars out there have planets
so far undetected
the fact that you're looking for planets
that so far haven't been seen mostly is
that some of the missing matter or what
that that's a good question and that's
one of the early hypotheses was that
maybe the dark matter is just planets
after all we now believe that planets
when they form some of the planets fall
inward but others are ejected from the
from their solar systems and the best
way to get a handle sort of a
back-of-the-envelope calculation is to
look at stars that are forming being
born out of molecular clouds and to
imagine that all of the material in
these typical discs around the stars is
ejected let's just take that as an
approximation and then would that be
enough to make up all of the missing
mass and the answer is no the
calculation has been done and that it
probably isn't a it's order magnitude
orders of magnitude too low to account
for the missing matter in fact not only
is most of the missing matter in the
universe
probably not the stuff that stars and
planets are made of it's probably not
the stuff that anything is made of here
in the Yorkshire coast of northern
England the search for dark matter has
gone underground
this is the bull be mine whose mild deep
shafts provide cover from something
tantalizingly similar to the prime
suspect for missing matter and if you're
standing on the surface of the earth put
your hand out you get hit one Kazmir a
second goes through your hand and that
would spoil the detective signal that
we're looking for so go deep underground
then the large amount of rock between us
and the surface shields us from the
cosmic rays so when we're down in our
labs rather than one a second going
through your hand it's one a week
but while cosmic rays are exotic at
least they're made from subatomic
particles that science is familiar with
by contrast the things Nigel Smith is
trying to detect are bizarre even to
physicists here a mile down in a vein of
rock salt mine to spread on the winter
roads of northern England he's in a race
with some half dozen groups set up in
similar underground labs around the
world to be the first to detect what are
called with tongue-in-cheek
wimps for weakly interacting massive
particles wimps had the apparently
paradoxical property of being massive in
the sense that they exert a
gravitational tug while being almost
completely unable to connect with
ordinary matter in any other way in fact
to call them weakly interacting is to be
generous most often passed straight
through the earth and don't even notice
most on fast road through the Sun and
don't even notice but every so often
there's just one or two a month or a
year will actually hit a nucleus head-on
and that nucleus recoils and it's that
recoil
we're looking for but the majority of
the billions of wimps that are passing
through as we stand here every second
later scream straight through and you
never see them this is just one of three
different kinds of detectors here at the
United Kingdom's Dark Matter hunt and
the research project has just
constructed a large new underground
facility to house them there are other
detectors in tunnels beneath the
Apennine Mountains in Italy where a
joint Italian Chinese team has been
claiming evidence for wimps a claim met
with skepticism from their competitors
while in the United States a new
facility is being constructed in a mine
in northern Minnesota all this effort to
detect a hefty ghost particle that may
not even exist for those involved in the
hunt there's no doubt that it's worth it
it's a fantastic question if you're an
astronomer and someone says you don't
know what two-thirds of the universe is
made from that irritation so you want to
go out there you want to find out what
it is and astronomers aren't the only
ones in the hunt which is why I find
myself driving a golf cart through the
longest building in the world the
Stanford Linear Accelerator in
California I'm following the track of a
subatomic particle as its accelerated
during its two-mile trip to a speed
approaching the speed of light
eventually the beam of particles will be
divided and spun around a couple of
loops before crashing head-on into
particles coming in the opposite
direction and smashing into smithereens
we're visiting the collision point
appropriately with both a particle
physicist and an astronomer the beam of
particles will come down here go through
that pipe and then you hope that an
electron and a positron will meet
annihilate and new particles will be
more its from collisions like this that
scientists have built up their picture
of the fundamental particles of matter
and what they like to call the standard
model but for the standard model to work
physicists have been forced to invent a
strange mirror world in which the known
particles have ghostly cousins called
supersymmetric particles this extra set
of particles we haven't discovered yet
but they're our best candidate we think
it's the smoking gun for the dark matter
out there so you and I aren't made of
these supersymmetric particles but the
dark matter that's controlling a lot of
what's happening in our universe is made
of these supersymmetric particles that's
the best theory that's our best guess at
this right now this is interesting
you um you are pretty sure or are you
dead certain that the super that that
supersymmetric particles exist or have
existed less than pretty sure but it's
this were a horse race this is the
walnut I'd be putting my money on it is
thought that supersymmetric particles
are all over the universe they're out
there yes and how did they get started
what where do they come from
on the Big Bang itself the Big Bang so
are you trying to create a situation
something like the Big Bang where you
get both the particles and the
supersymmetric particles the mirror
versions of them
but I thought you needed something a lot
of did you need a lot more energy than
you could possibly get on earth to to
create a Big Bang we're not recreating
the Big Bang right thank God because a
lot but but we are able if we have
enough energy in our particle
accelerators to create the constituents
that were created in the Big Bang and so
at the same time that astronomers are
going underground and their hunt for the
missing Dark Matter particle physicists
- or burrowing to build the biggest atom
smasher ever in the hope of creating
Dark Matter this is the construction of
what's called the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN in Switzerland due to come
online in 2007 the LHC will have
gigantic detectors designed to peer into
the wreckage of particle collisions of
truly stupendous energies if not quite
the Big Bang and certainly the closest
we have ever been to the closest we've
actually been to it of course was with
the W map spacecraft which mapped the
ripples left as the Big Bang cooled in
the pattern of these ripples the W map
scientists see direct evidence for dark
matter you only get this if you have
about six times more Dark Matter than
all atoms combined what we did is we
generated literally tens of millions of
possible universes on the computer and
we compared them with our measurement of
the real universe that we have and I
think of it as like matching
fingerprints so this is the actual
fingerprint of the real suspect and we
have a mug book of fingerprints and we
match them up and we pick out the right
suspect that way and this max described
that the right suspect has this
substantial amount of dark matter in it
today then the evidence is mounting that
most of the stuff in the universe is not
only invisible to us but isn't even what
the visible stuff is made of but to
astronomers like Allan Dressler looking
back in time to see how the universe
began dark matter is more than just
astonishing it allowed us to be taking
this picture of way back in time and
you're seeing the formation of the stars
and what role does dark matter playing
that it's very important to see how
galaxies form but they couldn't have
formed we now believe without the dark
matter because there wasn't enough
gravity and all this kind of material
that we're made of to coalesce and make
stars and that's where the Dark Matter
played the pivotal role it actually held
this what we call baryonic normal matter
together and allowed it to be into
concentrate into cool and then make
stars so that transition from already
there were these sort of wells these
places where gravity was strong and all
those atoms suddenly said pull there's
gravity here from this dark matter and
they headed in that direction so they
fell into those little wells of gravity
that had been growing since the Big Bang
but if Dark Matters gravitational huged
was indispensable to our universes birth
we now know that from the start it's
been opposed by an anti gravity force
that might if things had turned out just
a little bit differently have
overwhelmed it and instead blown the
infant universe apart that story next
in the early 1990s two groups of
astronomers came up with a new idea for
discovering the ultimate fate of the
universe
both groups which were soon to become
rivals use several telescopes in their
quest including this one at Cerro to
Lolo in Chile they've had their nights
on the telescope sometimes actually
immediately after our nights or
in-between our nights so do you go
around looking for scraps of paper the
idealist lifter
no sometimes sometimes we look at yeah
we try to figure out what they've
observed but usually it's it's a it's a
friendly rivalry both teams use the
telescope to look for the same thing the
death of a star
but not just any stellar death a
particular kind caused when a companion
star dumps material onto a so-called
white dwarf until the white dwarf
reaches a critical mass and explodes
this is called a type 1a supernova and
the astronomers like it because all type
1a supernovae are almost exactly alike
identical flashbulbs popping off
randomly all over the sky with just a
two-minute exposure on this telescope we
can see halfway across the universe
myself powerful the telescope's aren't
how bright supernovae are so we can take
very short exposures and cover large
parts of the sky to discover supernovae
but discovering them is only the
beginning
once a supernova is spotted other even
bigger telescopes are standing by to
pounce on its light and read its
spectrum if we don't find supernovae in
this telescope and you know all the
other telescopes are waiting have
nothing to do right they get real mad at
us
it is the first time you're observing
within this test yeah this is our this
is the beginning of our season so we're
going to go three months now thirty half
nights searching for supernovae and
tonight is the first night so your your
exposure is covering all of this and
that's even more than a full moon being
the sky so what's the probability that
you'll you'll find the supermobile in
this one field yeah oh it's about one
it's one for this month but so sometime
during this month you're going to if you
keep pointing there you're gonna catch
at least one oh yes yeah definitely yeah
so the Alpha telescope is slowing so the
start is whipping by here's a cool image
that this is the first image that came
off tonight so you can see lots of
galaxies yeah galaxies stars here's a
very nice spiral galaxy here with
disturbed arms so you can observe right
you mean more than a.m. now yes right
here yeah you only did the actually is
it here yes
the end of Sciences we know that all
right okay well let's see I'll just hit
a few keys no no way to this like I just
like to poke around what
what what should i do first for him when
he says okay you hit enter and that's it
that's it no okay okay okay
there he goes there it is and that sound
was the shutter opening oh yeah yeah I
heard that I'm taking data you've read
your first image in search of supernova
that first night of the season Nick and
Chris and their team took 16 different
snapshots of the sky by the next night
now no longer observing from the
telescope but from a control room in the
nearby town they had processed several
of those images and one of them though
sadly not mine
came up a winner so here we've got a big
diffuse source of light and it looks
like it's probably a galaxy and in both
the images we there's apparently a
little new light source just outside
that galaxy that looks like a supernova
to me right this would be a really good
candidate if we get a follow up image to
do to do spectroscopy as a matter of
fact we don't need to follow up image of
this this definitely is a supernova
supernovae are very rare events the last
one in our galaxy was 300 years ago so
it's only by staring at tens of
thousands of galaxies at a time that the
supernova hunters can hope for success
once they found one there are only a few
days before its explosion dies away so
there isn't much time for a large
telescope like the Keck in Hawaii to get
its spectrum this spectrum not only
confirms it's a type 1a but it also
gives its age the older the light the
more it's been stretched as space itself
is expanded and so the longer its
wavelength the more it's shifted toward
the red and because every type 1a
supernova explodes like a standard
flashbulb its brightness reveals how far
away it is and this is why both rival
teams of astronomers were hunting so
eagerly for type 1a supernovae by
finding supernovae of different ages and
measuring their distance
both groups hope to find the answer to
one of astronomy's great questions what
is the ultimate fate of the universe we
met members of one team at Sarah - Lola
the other is based here at the Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory in California and is
led by Saul Perlmutter
both teams expected to measure how much
the expansion of the universe has been
slowing due to gravity especially the
gravity of all that recently discovered
dark matter it's and we thought it was
made a great project we were going to
find out whether the universe was gonna
last forever or not or whether someday
all the stuff in the universe all the
matter in the universe would slow the
expansion down to the point that would
come to a halt and then collapse and
what we ended up with was when we
started looking at the data it looked
like there was very little mass in the
universe in fact it wasn't slowing very
much at all and then as you really look
for the data you start losing heads not
only not so much at all it's not even
slowing it's actually speeding up and
that was a real shock because we it was
not part of the original you know
description of our of our project when
we were applying to use the telescopes
it was way better than that
instead of slowing down due to gravity
the expansion of the universe appeared
to be speeding up as if under the
influence of some sort of anti-gravity
the rival team was coming to the same
mind-boggling conclusion was it an
exciting moment or was it just puzzling
and puzzling and concerning because it's
it wasn't the expected result so I mean
we were expecting deceleration so really
the the knot twists up in your stomach
saying okay let's go back and do this
again make sure this is right
and you go back through the numbers once
again you go back to the numbers yet
again it's now you're starting to
believe well we're on to something here
Wow and and the whole group you know
we're distributed and so the emails
start coming in Xin Jie's can this be
right you don't want to come out with
anything that's wrong of course in you
know in a scientific Gill a major
scientific announcement and so you're
being so careful trying to check well
you know maybe it's this maybe it's that
you're looking at every possible thing
finally can't conclusion but we have to
come out and say it were you all getting
it right around the same time yeah we
announced at the same time in 1998 at a
conference in Santa Barbara and both
groups came out and we sort of knew that
the other team was going to announce the
same thing and I'm never sure how we
knew that but we selected were you
pointing your telescope in their window
I look at their papers well we know we
wouldn't do that the fact that both
teams got the same result I think gave
people a lot of confidence that it
wasn't just some mistake that somebody
had made in their calculation because
they knew the two teams would have loved
to have you know been able to to you
know get the right answer and and showed
the other one the you know in what might
be wrong I have done it not everyone was
taken aback by the idea of a runaway
universe Michael Turner had actually
predicted the possibility several years
earlier reviving an old idea of none
other than Albert Einstein Turner came
up with a name for a force that could
push the universe apart dark energy but
its roots
lay in one of Einstein's famous
equations the notion of dark energy was
as I understand it something that he
came up with and didn't really
understand they've come up with it how
far off am i over that that catches a
lot of it I mean in science people were
often confused and so Einstein was
confused about the expansion of the
universe his equations wanted a universe
that expanded and so he put in this
fudge factor that cancelled the
attractive gravity of matter when just a
few years later the universe was
discovered actually to be expanding the
cosmological constant Einsteins
antigravity fudge factor was no longer
needed he gratefully discarded it
calling it his greatest blunder but it
it's one of the wonderful things about
science is when we are in this struggle
to try to understand we invent things
and once you take something out of
Pandora's Box you can't put it back and
so he this idea was laying around in our
idea box and it's sort of like
anti-gravity it's a repulsive gravity
and so it resurfaced again in trying to
understand why the universe not is
expanding but the expansion is speeding
up how did you come up with the name a
dark energy it's kind of a nice yin and
yang with the dark matter you know so we
have dark matter and we have dark energy
and they're fundamentally different and
that's you know matter is different than
energy and then you know today in we
have the battle between the dark matter
and the dark energy
there is one uniquely privileged
spectator to the battle between dark
matter and dark energy the Hubble Space
Telescope perched high above the
atmosphere of Earth it has a clear view
of the supernova beacons used to track
the universe's history we went to visit
the control room for the Hubble Space
Telescope in Baltimore I want to do some
you're welcome to the Space Telescope
Science Institute thank you I can't wait
to see ya my guide is supernova hunter
Adam Reese can you tell me what all
these folks in here are doing I mean
there's constant activity and chatter
and what is it all about right there
primarily monitoring health and safety
they're looking at telemetry they're
looking at temperatures and voltages of
thousands of different components on the
telescope and making sure they're all
within their tolerances they're looking
at the heating on one side of the
telescope when it's in the Sun side
about once a week we upload a whole
week's worth of observations on what's
supposed to be done that week to the
telescope and so if we find a supernova
for example we usually have to find it
by Tuesday because Tuesday is the
special day when they build the calendar
for the next week it's sort of funny the
lights been traveling for 11 billion
years it finally arrives and it's got a
Roger - today in March 2002 the space
shuttle Columbia on what was - turn out
to be its last completed mission
installed a new camera on the Hubble the
advanced camera for surveys this camera
is much more sensitive to light and it
also has more area so I have a better
chance of finding a supernova every time
I take an image in the sky
Adams plan was to look back with the new
Canberra to supernovae exploding when
the universe was young he found some
half-dozen ranging in age back to eleven
billion years ago his hope was to find
out at the universe has always been
pushed apart by dark energy or if it
once had been reined in by the
gravitational pull of dark matter we
have roughly Adam riess works closely
with mario livio adam observes the
universe mario comes up with theories
about it basically you have the universe
behaving something like this at first it
is expanding against gravity so think of
it as if it's held back by some sort of
a spring but it's get bigger and bigger
and bigger over over millions billions
of years that's right that's right and
then at some point it's out five billion
years ago we think it stops slowing down
and instead of collapse over well that's
what we would expect it'll get that big
and then come back well even if not come
big but at least go slower and slower
and slower right instead it's suddenly
starts going faster and faster and
faster and you found out when it started
going faster and faster that's right we
actually witnessed the the transition
from the more recent accelerated
expansion to the earlier slowing
expansion this turning point in the
history of the universe came at about
five billion years ago when dark matter
began losing its gravitational pull
against dark energies inexorable push
you know gravity decreases in proportion
to distance you know if you double the
distance gravity becomes four times
weaker right this force that you get
from the dark energy when you make
double the distance the force becomes
twice larger oh yeah you may think it's
a prop we think it's a property actually
of the vacuum and so when there's more
vacuum between you and a distant galaxy
there's more of this dark energy with
every
there is a factor of an increase in the
in the amount of dark energy that has a
factor on the speed yes it's right it's
a little bit like a built in spring in
the vacuum and as the something gets
further away there are more and more of
these Springs connected and there's it's
harder to compress in fact they're
pushing more and more and so the bigger
the universe gets dark matter is losing
its pull on the universe dark energy is
gaining its push it's always been there
right the question that's now obsessing
astronomers including Michael Turner is
what dark energy might be so we just
don't know what it is if it is the like
Einsteins cosmological constant then
it's just the energy of nothing and
according to quantum mechanics nothing
is not nothing it's full of particles
that are living on borrowed time and
borrowed energy we call it pop into
existence into existence and then when
the accounts come along they disappear
and so if it's the energy of nothing
it's always been there and then we're in
for a very tough bit of history in the
future because the universe will keep
speeding up and speeding up and speeding
up and things will get farther and
farther away and instead of the
beautiful sky we have today with
billions of galaxies we'll only see a
couple it could be that it's just a
phase we're going through that
something's out of whack and that the
dark energy will dissipate I think what
you're starting to see is we don't know
very much about it at all all this stuff
didn't fill us in that much um we need
help
we need some help help may be on the way
from a proposed new spacecraft expressly
designed for supernova hunting
with a camera able to image thousands of
supernovae at a time the snap satellite
would hugely increase the number of
beacons out there measuring the
universe's expansion this might not only
help find out what dark energy is but
also help answer what is perhaps the
deepest question of all is there a
reason why the universe turns out right
now to be an almost perfect balance
between the pull of dark matter and the
push of dark energy or is the fact that
dark energy didn't blow it apart in its
infancy just a lucky accident
maybe the BIGBANG that turned out so
well for us was just one big bang among
many if this first of expansion happened
here there's no reason it wouldn't
happened here and there and in the past
and in the future right right in in the
same universe in the same universe in
the what was to say what started out it
so now we need new language yeah yeah
yeah so the universe as the whole ball
of wax but they're different
disconnected pieces it was like bubbles
in the glass of champagne exactly this
is that this the champagne is is the
early or a universe at any given time or
the multiverse at the moment yeah and
the each bubble is a new universe it's a
new universe if this is our universe
uh-huh where would the other universes
be in this multiverse thanks for passing
me the universe here we're actually kind
of sloppy in astronomy when we talk
about the universe which is what we
usually mean it's just the interior of
this beachball the part of the universal
we can observe exactly call the universe
and and that's of course strictly
speaking not true at all because I don't
know it has I don't have a single
colleague who would entertain it space
just ends here you know there's a sign
here saying space ends here don't mind
the gap we all believe that space goes
on outside yeah and if most of us
believe that space actually goes on
forever it's infinite which means that
there's another sphere like this and in
the middle of that maybe there's another
planet where people discuss their
universe and can't see ours
there this probably infinitely many of
these if you have this ensemble of
universes there may be some basic things
which are true for all for all of them
but there may be some quantities which
are accidental in these different
universes some of those universes will
allow life to evolve and us to be here
and speak about this and some want
we said at the outset that our universe
just got a whole lot weirder dominated
by matter we can't see and the force we
can't feel but maybe it's even weirder
than that not only are we not at the
center of our universe
maybe we're not even in the only
universe just in one in which dark
matter and dark energy fought each other
at least when it mattered back when the
stuff were made of was created to a
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