-[ Quoting Mark Bloss , to Dennis Menard ]-
 DM> Forgive me for this brief interruption, Richard:
 DM> Latest observations indicate expansion of the universe is
.    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 DM> `accelerating!' It is easy enough to check out; all major news sources
 DM> carried the story.
 MB> That's indeed strange.  I hate to come to the point where I must
 MB> contradict you - but latest observations have indeed demonstrated
 MB> without reservation that the Universe's expansion has been slowing
 MB> down.  It does move pretty fast though.
Such are the proclamations of those who fail to keep abreast of the field.
-----
February 27, 1998
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Scientists are scratching their heads over a finding
that indicates the universe, rather than slowing down, is being expanded by
a mysterious force at an accelerating rate.
If true, says one astronomer, in billions of years many of the stars will be
gone from the night sky.
"The universe will be a very lonely place to look at," says Robert Kirshner
of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
And if the finding is correct, it also supports a concept first proposed by
Albert Einstein, who later dismissed it as his biggest blunder.
"It is such a strange result we are still wondering if there is some other
sneaky little effect climbing in there," says Adam Riess, an astronomer at
the University of California, Berkeley.
Riess said he, Kirshner and others in the 15-member international team that
made the discovery "have looked hard for errors" but found none.
The findings were discussed at a meeting of scientists in Los Angeles last
month and reported in the journal Science.
Tracking the debris of exploded stars
Using the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii,
Australia and Chile, the astronomers tracked and repeatedly measured the
debris of 14 supernovae, or exploded stars, 7 billion to 10 billion
light-years from Earth.
A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year -- about 6
trillion miles.
Team members measured the speed at which these distant supernovae are moving
away. The rate was then compared with the motion of supernovae much closer
to Earth .
"How far away a supernova is, and how fast it's moving away from us, tells
us how fast the universe is expanding," Riess says.
They expected to find that the expansion of the universe was slowing from
the effect of gravity.
"People thought ... the universe was just coasting" from the force of the
Big Bang, Kirshner said. "Instead, we found it is actually speeding up."
According to the Big Bang theory, the universe exploded from a tiny point of
matter about 12 billion years ago and is still expanding, but at a slower
and slower rate.
But Riess and the others found that it is actually expanding faster than it
was 5 to 7 billion years ago.
Parallel study confirms finding
Rocky Kolb, a University of Chicago astronomer, said in Science that the
finding is so startling, "I think everyone should reserve judgment."
Kirshner said the conclusion will go through an intensive review before the
results are accepted, although he noted that preliminary results from a
parallel study by another astronomy group are in agreement.
"We are scratching our heads to think if there could be an alternative
explanation for it," says Riess, "something more mundane than a repulsive
force."
It is being called a repulsive force because it seems to be working against
gravity to speed up the expansion of the universe.
"If it's confirmed by other results and other approaches, it's going to tell
us there is something important, another constituent to the universe," says
Kirshner.
A fifth force at work?
Unlike matter, which slows down as it moves through space, the new force --
if the researchers are correct -- moves faster.
"That's very weird," says Kirshner. "But it's not unprecedented that weird
things might be true things."
Four forces are accepted by modern physics: the strong force, which holds
the nucleus of an atom together; the weak force, which causes atomic decay;
electromagnetic force, which holds electrons in orbit in an atom; and
gravity.
Kirshner says a fifth force could be at work.
The idea of a fifth force has been speculated about by physicists, he says.
"They have impossible ideas before breakfast," he said. "The interesting
thing is that some of these funny-sounding ideas might turn out to be
right."
If the researchers are right and the universe is, indeed, accelerating, the
finding could solve a problem for astronomers. Some measurements have put
the age of the universe at about 10 billion years, which is younger than the
measured ages of some stars.
With the acceleration of the universe factored in, said Riess, the universe
would have to be about 14 billion years old, some 2 billion years older
than the old eststar.
"That would no longer make the daughter older than the mother," he said.
Einstein's 'cosmological constant'
Einstein first proposed a "cosmological constant," which Riess described as
"a repulsive force that is a property of vacuum in space and time."
Riess said the constant, which Einstein dismissed, is "the only explanation
we have" for the acceleration.
"Our everyday experience tells us that a vacuum is empty, that there is
nothing in it. But that might not be true," Riess said. "There may be an
energy, a force , associated with a vacuum."
Over short distances, said Riess, this repulsive force can't be detected,
but over distances of 7 billion to 10 billion light-years, "this force
becomes something to reckon with, and is strong enough to overcome gravity
and cause the universe to accelerate."
Riess said he isn't surprised that the force hasn't been detected before.
"The force is very weak on a small scale and it only becomes important when
you are looking back," he said. "It's like a lot of little ants -- one is
weak but a lot of them can lift a big weight."
Correspondent Ann Kellan, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to
this report.
-----
I regret that I won't be able to do much in the way of follow-up in this
thread as I will be mostly out-of-town for the next few months as I have for
the past few. Though, I do wonder at your ability to dismiss the discoveries
of science, whether such discoveries are welcome or not.
--
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