The universe is expanding fast and in all directions! We have known that the universe expands since the 1920’s but discovered its acceleration in the year 1990. Expansion rates have gone up to 1% which is a huge increase. Observation of supernovas show that the expansion is occurring over time.
So, what are supernovas? They are exploding stars. There exists many different kinds of stars like white dwarfs, blue giants, red supergiants, etc. All have a different size, brightness and temperature. A star is constantly pushing out nuclear energy and crashing with gravity. When it runs out of atoms to fuse, it dies making all of its matter and radiation explode in the universe. This explosion is know as a supernova.
There exists two types of supernovas Type One A and Type Two. Scientists have studied over 1,000 Type One A supernovas to investigate the expansion of the universe. Type One A supernovas occur when white dwarf stars gain enough mass to collapse which end up with them exploding. Through them researchers are able to make approximations on how fast the universe spreads by measuring the amount of light that is stretched as space expands.
Previous investigations done on the expansion of the universe were done based on the noise it exerted. Through computer simulations scientist could determine and anticipate the noise. Dragan Huterer, a theoretical cosmologist from The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, states that “it’s a real pain to get simulations to have all the right bells and whistles”. He says that the best and most reliable way to obtain this information is through a method he and his partners utilized. They used a scrambled version of the the supernova data to measure how much sound to expect. Thank goodness we have amazing scientist in the world like Huterer who study such crucial magnificent changes occuring in the world.
