NASA Funded Astronomer Wins Nobel Prize

Berkeley physics gets another Nobel - Go Bears!

This is the first Nobel prize awarded to work done with traditional ground-based optical telescopes, and it's a great day for NOAO (my organization), which provided the facilities used by both teams to find and follow-up on the SN (as well as to provided observations to others who developed the use of SN Ia as standard candles). This work was thus heavily initially supported by the NSF, although Perlmutter's team was also supported by the DOE. HST had only a very tenuous connection to the initial discovery of the accelerating Universe. Where it really came to the fore was for latter work that pushed the SN Ia Hubble diagram to higher redshifts, which enabled the teams to rule out "gray dust" as a explanation of the observations, but most importantly probed the transition of the Universe from a decelerating to accelerating phase.

Here is what another scientist has to say about it.

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/10/an-insiders-account-of-the-nobel-prize-winning-dark-energy-discovery/

"Credit too must go to the National Science Foundation and NASA for supporting this project through their facilities of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The generous support for basic research and exploration by the US taxpayers have once again brought the Nobel Prize to the United States of America. In these times of budget crises, I hope that Congress does not lose sight of the fact that we are still the leaders in science in the world, and unless we continue to support basic research, we will soon find ourselves wondering how science and technology development has migrated to China and Europe."

A recent report says that what these people found is an illusion.It said we are in a large bubble moving at high speed,in relation to other space.This makes it look like space is expanding.No dark energy.It also explains the bias in one direction.

Saturn,

This sounds like a shot in the dark theory to me.  I haven’t seen antyhing about it.  Do you have any links/references for this recent report?

Thanks,

Steve

No, a theory was proposed that the apparent acceleration of cosmic expansion was an illusion due to us being located near the center of a mostly empty "bubble" about 8 billion ly across. No studies done have supported that theory, and at least one study done using HST claims and appears to rule out that theory. The bubble theory requires that the expansion rate for the Universe be between roughly 60-65 km/(mpc*s). Reiss' team measured the expansion rate using HST to be 73.8 km/(mpc*s), with an uncertainty of ± 3.3%. With an uncertainty that small, the bubble theory can't hold.

From Space.com,achieve P.5,Sep.27.
Cruising through space-time

Tsagas' alternative version of events, detailed in a recent issue of the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review D, builds on a recent discovery by Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at NASA's Observational Cosmology Laboratory. In a series of papers over the past three years, Kashlinsky and his colleagues have shown that the huge region of space-time in which we live — a region at least 2.5 billion light-years across — is moving relative to the rest of the universe, and fast. [Did the Universe Begin as a Simple 1-D Line?]

Some cosmologists remain skeptical about the newfound "dark flow," as it's called, and say that more evidence is needed to persuade them that the strange phenomenon is real. But the evidence that does exist is compelling. Based on light collected from galaxy clusters, our enormous bubble of space-time appears to be drifting at a rapid clip of up to 2 million miles per hour. No one knows why, exactly — there may be something beyond the part of the universe we can see, tugging on us — but Tsagas argues that the dark flow is skewing our perspective on the behavior of the universe as a whole.

"My article discusses how observers living inside such a large-scale 'dark flow' could arrive at the (false) conclusion that the universe is accelerating, while it is actually decelerating," Tsagas told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. In his paper, he illustrates that dark flow would cause the space-time within our moving bubble to expand faster than the space-time outside of it (which is not accelerating). Without considering the dark flow, but just knowing that light we observe from nearby galaxies left its source more recently than light from galaxies farther away, we get the false impression that the whole of space-time recently entered an accelerating phase.

In short, Tsagas' explains our observations of the expansion of space-time nearby and far away without invoking dark energy, or any other mysterious mechanism. According to Tsagas' work, the acceleration of the universe in our immediate vicinity is caused by its motion alone. The universe beyond our region isn't accelerating outward; rather, it is safely rolling to a stop.
I sure like this better than something is causing acceleration,but we don't know what it is.If it can be proven untrue,then that is how science works.There is more there,if you want to read it.

Thanks Saturn.

I’m going to try to look into this further for myself.  Whether our perceptible universe is expanding, shrinking, or staying the same is certainly of interest, but the larger issue, to me, is the possible existence of the “bubble.”  A bubble would imply that there is more than a single space-time contiguous within our universe, which means that methods for long-distance point-to-point movement through the universe may be theoretically possible.  Better still, if space-time “bubbles” can be created artificially, then we have a better theoretical possibility for FTL.  Of course, most people would probably dismiss these possibilities out of hand.

Steve