The Accelerating Universe

Last week, I was fortunate enough to go to a great lecture on the Accelerating Universe presented by 2011 Nobel Laureate for Physics, Professor Brian Schmidt.  He spoke about his research and how his team came to their conclusions about the universe accelerating.  It was definitely the highlight of my rather bleak week (mostly spent sick in bed).  Professor Schmidt was a great public speaker, I learnt about the difference between theorists and experimentalists within the field of astrophysics, and that some astrophysics still like to include Pluto in the list of planets in our Solar System (go Pluto!).  I had to leave early, but question time at the end was conducted through twitter #uqastro.

UQ's School of Mathematics & Physics calendar always has some great event on (like the Quest for Extremely Large Telescopes or the Transit of Venus events that I went to last year).

Professor Schmidt will also be offering a free online astronomy course at ANU through edX.org next year (read about it here and here).  MOOCs are really coming into their own at the moment which is so exciting for someone like me who loves to learn and study!   I really enjoyed the Intro to Astronomy course I did through coursera.org/Duke University over the Christmas Holidays (I still have a couple of units to finish).  Astronomy has got to be one of my favourite things to learn about, I am such a space nerd at heart!



Images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope via NASA.