The 2012 Investigator Lecture was delivered on Wednesday 24 October by 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Dr Brian Schmidt, The High-z Supernova Search Team, Australian National University.

You can watch the Lecture “The Accelerating Universe” here. 

In 1998 two teams traced back the expansion of the universe over billions of years and discovered that it was accelerating, a startling discovery that suggests that more than 70% of the cosmos is contained in a previously unknown form of matter, called Dark Energy. The 2011 Nobel Laureate for Physics, Brian Schmidt, leader of the High-Redshift Supernova Search Team, will describe this discovery and explain how astronomers have used observations to trace our universe’s history back more than 13 billion years, leading them to ponder the ultimate fate of the cosmos.

Brian Schmidt (with two other physicists) received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”. This discovery has helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion continues to speed up, the Universe will end in ice.

A unique opportunity to hear from an internationally renowned scientist whose research is right at the edge.