This page contains the material submitted to the local paper - The Davis Enterprise - for Explorit Science Center's news column published in that paper on Fridays.

One of the world’s leading astronomers visits Davis this Monday to share his new view of the universe. Explorit Science Center, the UC Davis Department of Physics/Cosmology and the UC Davis Astronomy Club are excited to host a lecture and book signing by Robert Kirshner on Monday, November 4 at 7:30 p.m.

Supernova expert Robert Kirshner will speak about the recent discovery made by his research team that the universe is accelerating under the influence of a dark energy that makes space itself expand. The discovery, detailed in Kirshner’s new book “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Cosmos,” goes against our conventional understanding of physics.

Astronomers have been measuring the motions of galaxies since 1912. At first, theories suggested that the universe was static. By 1929, Edwin Hubble observed that distant galaxies were receding away from our own Milky Way more rapidly than closer galaxies. This observation indicated that the universe was expanding. Astronomers believed that this expansion would slow down over time, due to gravity.

Over the past few years, Kirshner and his team have been measuring light from exploding stars, or supernovae. These explosions are bright enough to be observed halfway across the universe and allow one to measure directly the history of cosmic expansion. The measurements made by Kirshner’s team show, according to Kirshner, “that we live in a universe that is not static as Einstein thought, and not just expanding as Hubble showed, but accelerating!”

On November 4, Kirshner will talk about the acceleration of the universe and what it means for us here on Earth. "It's a strange picture we have painted,” Kirshner says. “The universe has dark energy and dark matter, neither of which is familiar to us from our everyday experience, or detected from any experiment on Earth. The visible part of the universe and the beautifully elaborate atoms that make up our bodies and our world are not the main material constituents of the cosmos. We have gone from thinking of ourselves as the centerpiece of creation through a series of cosmic leaps of understanding to seeing ourselves as observers and beneficiaries of a great pageant in space and time that we don't affect, but that has affected us greatly.”

The lecture and book signing will take place on the UC Davis campus at 66 Roessler in the Physics/Geology building. The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking on campus is $5.00. Copies of “The Extravagant Universe” will be available for purchase during the lecture.

Robert Kirshner is Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University and head of the Optical and Infrared Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He currently teaches Harvard’s undergraduate course “Matter in the Universe” and is author of over 200 scientific publications. He has written for National Geographic, Scientific American and Sky & Telescope.

For directions or more information, please call Explorit at 530-756-0191.

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