Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe

All of the galaxies in the universe are going places, and they’re in a hurry to get there. Seemingly driven by mysterious dark energy or vacuum energy, astronomers observed that as the universe expanded, it was speeding up. And the Keck observatory at Mauna Kea played a crucial role in making this discovery.

Two rival teams of astronomers used the telescopes in Hawaii to examine a large inventory of distant type IA supernovae, which result from the collapse of white dwarf stars. The uniform brightness of these supernovae make them ideal beacons for measuring cosmic distances, which allows scientists to accurately estimate the speed of cosmic expansion.

While the competition between the two groups of researchers was fierce, leaders of both teams were awarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011.