Reflection to a Conference: "Supernovae Reveal An Accelerating Universe"

I had the opportunity to assist to Adam Riess' public conference last Monday. It took place in the Amphitheater 1 at the General Studies building. The conference was titled: "Supernovas: Dark Matter? Dark Energy? The Surprising History of the Expanding Universe". Adam Riess is Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the John Hopkins University and a Senior member of the Science Staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute, both in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Riess is a renowned astrophysicist who won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. Why? Riess' study led to the discovery of an accelerating Universe.  

"The Universe is not just expanding, but actually accelerating and accelerating." His research involves the study of the cosmological framework with the supernovae or exploding stars. Riess indicated three reasons trying (because they really don't know) to explain why the Universe is accelerating now. The reasons are the following: vacuum energy, dynamical dark energy, and modified gravity. Riess started his research in 1998 when he discovered accelerating expansion and dark energy, and confirmed this with more distant supernovae from Hubble Space Telescope.

An important fact that caught my attention was that the Universe is actually 13.4 billion year old. I didn't know this fact before. Another fact that I liked was the percentage distribution of what is the Universe composed. The components of the Universe with their respective percentages are: planets (0.05%), stars (0.5%), dark matter (25%), gas (4%), and dark energy (70%). In general terms, I liked the conference and how he interact with us (his public). He gave an interesting talk and it was never monotonous. I found funny that he told: "How do we really know our Universe is expanding? We checked!" It made me laugh!