Qld Astrofest Honoured Guest 2009

Prof Michael Drinkwater - "Dark Energy and Sound Waves from the Early Universe"

3:00 pm Saturday 22nd August In the Dining Hall.

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Almost ten years ago, two rival teams made one of the most surprising discoveries in astrophysics. Rather than slowing down due to gravity, as expected, the expansion of the Universe was speeding up.

We still have no idea why this is happening, so we blame it on some mysterious force dubbed “dark energy”. I my talk I will try to convince you of the evidence that 75 per cent of the Universe is made of this mysterious dark energy. I will then describe an ambitious 4-year project I am co-leading designed to test the most popular theory for dark energy.

Our project, the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, will measure the positions of 200,000 galaxies using a new spectrograph on the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope. We will use the survey to measure a faint pattern in the distribution of galaxies: the 500-million-lightyear “wiggles” caused by sound waves in the early universe.

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"I started my formal astronomy during a 4-year BSc degree at the University of Sydney. I graduated in 1984 and continued my studies with a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. My thesis research was on quasar clustering measured from U.K. Schmidt Telescope photographic plates. I got my Ph.D. in 1988 and my first job was at Université Laval in Québec City, Canada. Here I worked on quasar absorption line systems, dwarf galaxies, and the liquid mirror project. I also learnt to ski and speak French fluently. I returned to Australia in 1991 to work at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. For research I worked on dwarf galaxies in the Virgo and Fornax clusters as well as a new sample of quasars from the Parkes radio telescope. From there I went to the UNSW in Sydney in 1996. At UNSW I started the "Fornax Cluster Spectroscopic Survey" using the 2dF spectrograph back on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. (I also became a proud father!) I continued moving south, to the University of Melbourne, in 1999. There I led the discovery of a new type of "ultra-compact dwarf” galaxy, which we investigated with the Hubble Space Telescope. Finally I was lured to Queensland by the offer of a lectureship at the University of Queensland in 2002. We love Brisbane and I’m not moving again!"