Bob Kirshner from Harvard wows Kiwi audiences with talks on supernova cosmology
Last week we invited Professor Robert Kirshner from Harvard University to visit New Zealand. We invited him as the Royal Society of New Zealand Distinguished Science lecturer for 2009 and in order to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy.
For those readers who do not know, Bob Kirshner is one of the world’s leading astronomers and definitely one of the most stimulating public speakers. He is currently the Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard and comes from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Kirshner and his High-Z supernova team were joint recipients of the Gruber Prize in cosmology for their work on type Ia supernovae, which apparently shows that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. This is the work which has led to the discovery of the so-called ‘dark energy’ or Λ-term in modern cosmology. Kirshner is also the author of a popular book on this subject, with the title ‘The extravagant universe’.
Professor Robert Kirshner, Harvard University
