They grabbed the nearest blue-and-gray sheet of IBM printout paper, flipped it over and began scribbling a plan: the telescopes to secure, the peers to recruit, the responsibilities to delegate. But by how much? Just enough that the expansion will eventually come to an eternal standstill? Or so much that the expansion will eventually reverse itself in a kind of about-face big bang? Specifically, in a universe full of matter that is gravitationally attracting all other matter, logic dictates that the expansion of space-which began at the big bang and has continued ever since-would be slowing. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their expertise to tackle one of the fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the fate of the universe? Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae-exploding stars. ![]() ![]() ![]() One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking.
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