Dark Energy

More than anything else, in the wake of the elation and tumult accompanying Tuesday's announcement that he'd won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess wants to get back to work. "I really want to keep doing the research I do, and not just supervise people doing research," a fate that sometimes befalls Nobel laureates, he said. His discovery of dark energy, and the accelerating expansion of the universe was, after all, something he accomplished in 1998 at the University of California Berkeley - at the age of 28. Since then, he has moved to Hopkins and used powerful instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope to push even farther toward the edge of the visible universe, and toward unraveling the mystery of dark energy.

At a recent National Association of Science Writers Conference in Baltimore, the "Lunch with a Scientist" session offered a menu of informal talks on a wide range of topics. Though my employer pays me to know and write about the retina - the thin piece of vision-critical tissue in the back of the eye - I decided to be a little derelict in my duties and learn about something completely new and unrelated. I considered sitting at the table where "Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Lessons from an Amoeba" was being presented, but I figured that might lead to flashbacks of former girlfriends and images of pond scum - two topics that don't exactly arouse my appetite.

Any award that is shared with Will Ferrell, one-half of the pathetic head-jerking, girl-prowling Butabi brothers from Saturday Night Live, may be of dubious distinction, but that is the fate of Adam Riess. Riess, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is among a group of people chosen as the country's "best and brightest" in the new issue of Esquire magazine, which hit newsstands yesterday. It is the second year in a row that someone from Baltimore has landed on the list.

Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars. Light from the big bang's afterglow shows that the universe grew from the size of a marble to an astronomical size in just a trillionth of a second after its birth 13.7 billion years ago, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Princeton universities say. Readings from a NASA probe also show that the earliest stars formed about 400 million years after the big bang - not 200 million years afterward, as the research team once thought.

For an astronomer, Adam Riess would make a pretty lame tour guide to the night sky. He didn't grow up glued to a backyard telescope. He rarely gives the stars a second look after dark. And he's more likely to spot a Ford Taurus on the street than its namesake in the heavens. "I can find the Big Dipper. I can find Orion," he says, ticking off the stellar geography he knows. "After that, I would be struggling." But for answers to the big questions - What's the universe made of? How will it end?

The Baltimore astrophysicist credited with discovering "dark energy," the mysterious force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, says he has used the Hubble Space Telescope to disprove a competing explanation for the phenomenon. Adam Riess, of the Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, says his team, using Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3, was able to look at more stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. That eliminated errors introduced in previous work, which compared measurements from Hubble and other telescopes.

Kennywood Park sits high on a bluff above the Monongahela River, with a sweeping view of the puffing steel mills on the river's shore and the coal barges that crawl slowly toward them.For 100 years, this place - at first just a leafy picnic grove - has given the families of Pittsburgh's workers respite, a lofty remove from the workaday world below.Kennywood Park is a 75-acre, family-owned amusement park in the age of Disney, Universal and Busch. It is located at the end of a labyrinth of city streets when other parks have their own interstate exits.

The administration has a budget deal, and a missile defense scheme to bust it. There's nothing wrong with the U.S. energy supply that cannot be fixed by making every house a windmill. Hollywood producers and writers cannot agree on whether their story is sitcom, soap opera, juvenile, action thriller or reality. Stay tuned. Uh-oh! Mysterious "dark energy" has been discovered in Wyman Park.

When it comes to pondering fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, three scientists working at the Johns Hopkins University are among the leaders of the pack. It's a challenging race to be in these days, attempting to answer cosmic questions like the nature of the weak gravitational force that permeates the universe, or the "dark energy" that seems to be pushing the universe apart. CHARLES BENNETT "My research looks back to the dawn of time and the very earliest moments of the universe, where our two models of physics - gravity physics and quantum mechanics - break down and conflict with each other," said astrophysicist Charles Bennett.