ABSTRACT
Inflation was supposed to have stopped a long, long time ago-at least in our corner of the multiverse. But if Saul Perlmutter is right, inflation’s back.
In 1998, Perlmutter and his colleagues on the Supernova Cosmology Project announced that cosmic expansion is accelerating, fueled by some mysterious, all-pervasive ‘‘dark energy‘‘ that dominates everything, including gravity. As thin as a marathon runner and fueled by an almost manic enthusiasm-call it bright energy-Perlmutter seems determined to keep pace with the runaway universe. ‘‘There is so much to learn,’’ he says. ‘‘We dabble here and dabble there, and eventually with enough dabbling we hope to pull together a nice big picture that we really like.’’½3
Hemay call what he does ‘‘dabbling,’’ but in reality the work is frantic and grueling. From his office at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory overlooking San Francisco Bay, he directs astronomers around the globe in all-night observing marathons with some of the world’s largest telescopes. The researchers target distant galaxies in hopes of capturing stars in the act of exploding. These supernovae flare like fireworks-suddenly and brightly-and then fade quickly. To find them across billions of light-years of space, the astronomers photograph thousands of
galaxies in a single night, hunting among the billions of stars in each one for any that weren’t there just a few weeks earlier. When a supernova is found, Perlmutter and his colleagues can then sift through its redshifted light for nuggets of information about the expansion of the universe.
