"The universe from beginning to end"
Dr Brian Schmidt, Federation Fellow, Mount Stromlo Observatory, ANU
Wednesday 29 April 2009 at 6.30 pm
Eastern Avenue Auditorium, University of Sydney
The Pollock Memorial Lecture is presented jointly by the University of Sydney and the Royal Society of NSW. The Lectureship has been awarded about every four years since 1949 and is sponsored by the University of Sydney and the Royal Society of NSW in memory of Professor J.A. Pollock, Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney (1899-1922) and a member of the Society for 35 years.
Despite hundreds of years of dedicated scientific research, we only know what 4% of the Universe is made up of. In the last 15 years we have realised that there is another 96% of missing stuff that we just can't see. This missing stuff is made up of two mysterious substances, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, that are battling for domination of the Universe.
In the Pollock Memorial Lecture, Professor Brian Schmidt, from the Australian National University, will describe exciting new experiments, including those using the SkyMapper telescope, that are monitoring the struggle between these two dark forms. The aim is to predict the ultimate fate of the Cosmos!
Professor Brian Schmidt is a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory. While at Harvard University in 1994 he formed the High Z SN Search team, a group of 20 astronomers on five continents who used distant exploding stars to trace the expansion of the Universe back in time. This group's discovery of an accelerating Universe was named Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year for 1998. Brian is continuing his work using exploding stars to study the Universe, and is leading Mt Stromlo's effort to build the SkyMapper telescope, a new facility that will provide a comprehensive digital map of the southern sky from ultraviolet to near infrared wavelengths.