Schaefer guest at Nobels
LSU astrophysicist Bradley Schaefer started working on a supernova observation project 15 years ago from a large telescope in Arizona.
That effort is sending him to Stockholm, Sweden, next month as an invited guest for the “pomp and circumstance” that goes along with the Nobel Prize Award ceremony.
Schaefer was part of the original Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter, who is one of the Nobel Prize Award winners in physics along with Adam Reiss and Brian Schmidt of the competing High-z Supernova Search Team.
They are receiving the award for 1998 discovery of “dark energy,” which is essentially the mysterious force that is causing the universe to expand more rapidly.
“It should be wonderfully exciting and fun,” Schaefer said Wednesday of the Nobel ceremony and the associated balls and events.
While Schaefer may not have won the prestigious award, he said he is just thrilled to be a part of it. He said Perlmutter, who works from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, and the other winners are very deserving.
“He (Perlmutter) was the one who had the vision and actually got the thing going,” Schaefer said.
Schaefer said he was brought on as one of the initial team members 15 years ago because of his background with “supernova photometry” and because he was the observer on the WIYN telescope in Arizona. “They needed big telescopes,” he said.
The idea was that studying the brightness and activity of supernovas would serve as mile markers for the expansion of the universe and allow them to determine the universe’s growth rate, he said.
They were attempted to solve the debate whether the university was expanding infinitely or whether it would stop at some point and then begin to slowly collapse in reverse, he said.
“What we found instead is that the universe is not only expanding, it’s happening faster and faster,” Schaefer said. “The universe will keep expanding forever and ever.”
They also determined that some force was seemingly “pushing” the universe to expand more quickly. Thus, he said they made the discovery of “dark energy” and its “new physics.”
“We gave it the name dark energy, but we don’t know what dark energy is,” Schaefer said.
What the universe expansion also means is that the universe is spreading out more and galaxies like our Milky Way galaxy are separating more and more from each other, he said.
Many years from now, we will not be able to observe other galaxies from Earth, he said.
“All the stars in the Milky Way galaxy will eventually burn out,” he said. “Our own galaxy will be completely dark.
“We’re heading to a cold and empty university,” Schaefer added.
But that is many billions of years away from happening in a universe that is already estimated at being 13.7 billion years old, he said.
“In the meantime, I’m confident the summer will be around again in a few months,” he said.
Schaefer, along with all of the members of the Supernova Cosmology Project team, were also recipients of the 2007 Gruber Prize for Cosmology, a $500,000 award. But the Nobel Prize only goes to the research leaders.
The Nobel Prize ceremony is Dec. 10 in Sweden.
Entirely by coincidence, Dec. 10 also is the date of the next total lunar eclipse.
“I don’t know what the meaning is, but I think it’s a good omen,” Schaefer said with a laugh.