they can be brighter than entire galaxies. They can be seen across billions of light years” (1). Finding a 1A supernovas was no easy task until the Supernovas Cosmology Project developed a good method. “Ground-based telescopes in Chile and elsewhere take pictures of small patches of sky, enough to include a thousand galaxies at a time. The same fields are recorded again three weeks later, both to take advantage of the dark of the moon, and, says Gerson Goldhaber, who developed the technique, “because we want to catch supernova before it reaches its maximum brightness.” Any new bright spot in the field is a supernova candidate” (1).Astronomers compare the light from supernovas near and far to estimate the distance of each from earth. The farther away the supernova, the dimmer its light. The most distant ones discovered so far appear to have occurred more than seven billion years ago, about halfway back to the supposed moment of cosmic creation in the Big Bang. The nearer ones signal explosions some 5 billion years ago, a little before the sun and its planets were created. Next, the astronomers plot the supernova distances against the “redshift” of the objects’ light, a measure of how fast cosmic expansion was carrying the galaxies outward at the time of each explosion. This motion displaces the light of an object toward the long-wavelength, or red, end of the spectrum. (1) The redshifts of the 40 supernovas the Supernova Cosmology Project studies, every single one showed that the universe has been expanding. (1) There was absoluteley no evidence to support that the Universe was not expanding by using the supernovas as measure sticks. “The most likely interpretation, the scientists concluded, is that the universe will expand foreever, galaxies continuing to drift apart and everything becoming darker and more tenuous” (5).By observing and researching supernovas, on...
