Comet Enthusiast

Supernovas have helped astronomers to discover one of the greatest mysteries of science, acting like a time machine to help us understand why the universe is spreading out at an accelerating rate, according to Kirshner.

“We do not understand what this is. We really have no deep understanding of it," says Kirshner. Yet it represents one of the most important forces in the universe, given its ability to stretch out space and cause stars and galaxies to move away from one another at an accelerating rate.

Supernovas, were used by astronomers as beacons that can give information about distance and time. “We can see into the past in a kind of time machine,” he said. It was while studying these beacons that astronomers learned something was making stars accelerate away faster than they should have. “We found the supernovas were a little bit further away than we expected,” he said.