Brian Schmidt's wine isn't quite as good as his science, but it is a nice tipple.  There he is pressing grapes at the top of the page - the guy with the akubra hat. And there's a bunch of astronomers picking the grapes for him at his Canberra vineyard. May his universe keep accelerating towards more and more happiness.

And the Nobel Prize in Physics goes too...

Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.  The expansion of the universe has been known for many years now.  However Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess, along with their supporting cast took those measurements to the next level.

Perlmutter and Schmidt investigated the light from Type Ia Supernovae explosions by setting up two rival teams to search for these energetic explosions.  Riess, working for Schmidt, took the data and converted the amount of light we received from the explosion into what the Type Ia's intrinsic luminosity.  With that in hand he could calculate the distance to these objects and compare that against their redshift.  This allowed for an extremely precise measurement of the expansion of the universe and its evolution in time.

What they found was amazing.  Instead of a fixed expansion like was expected from a simple Hubble Law, they found that the expansion changed overtime.  It changed in such a way that as one got closer to the present time the universe was expanding faster and faster.  Thus the universe's expansion was accelerating.

This discovery set off a flurry of activity in the cosmological community to explain this expansion as well as figure out what will happen if it continues.  If the expansion continues to accelerate, and given the fact that the universe appears to have a flat geometry, it seems that the eventual fate of the universe is that we will expand forever to the point where we will no longer see any other stars in the sky.  Naturally this will take hundreds of billions of years.  This also assumes that the acceleration continues and does not reverse itself in the future.  Regardless of the future fate of the now incorrectly named Hubble constant, we know for sure that the expansion is variable and currently accelerating.

ALMA First Light

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has released it's first light images (seen above) and is now is open for business.  Located in the Atacama desert in Chile, it is in one of the driest regions in the world.  The plateau itself is 5 km above sea level and shielded by the Chilean Coastal Range.  This insures that the desert gets no water.  This is great for submillimeter astronomers, as water vapor is a significant foreground to their measurements.

ALMA itself has been about a decade in the making and is a collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).  Currently made of nineteen 12 meter radio telescopes ALMA will continue to expand until it reaches completion in 2013 with 66 telescopes.  This will allow ALMA to reach resolutions 5 times smaller than the Hubble Space Telescope and 10 times better than the Very Large Array (VLA).  This will allow astronomers to get an unprecedented look at the submillimeter sky.  This view will allow us to better understand protostellar formation, planet formation, black hole physics, and starburst galaxies just to name a few.

Speaking of starburst galaxies, the first light image is of the Antennae galaxy which happens to be one.  The Antennae is the result of a major merger of two spiral galaxies of roughly the same size.  The image shows the famous Hubble image in blue with the ALMA image in yellow and orange.  The magatama shaped ALMA image shows where the protostars in this starburst galaxy are forming.  These stars are currently buried in their natal clouds and as such are invisible to Hubble due to extinction.  However, ALMA reveals these regions allowing us to probe the locations of star formation themselves, before the stars that form blow away all the surrounding gas and dust.