Prof backs Mt John as reserve

A world-leading astronomer supports Tekapo's bid for a World Heritage Reserve.

Professor Robert Kirschner, from Harvard University, has been in the country over the last week as part of the Royal Society of New Zealand's lecture tour and visited the Mt John Observatory in Tekapo yesterday.

Professor Kirschner said he was delighted with this week's announcement that Tekapo/Aoraki-Mt Cook had been shortlisted as one of five world heritage night sky reserve sites to be considered at next year's Unesco world heritage meeting.

"I think it's a great way to get people thinking about what's out in the universe," he said.

"New Zealand may take it for granted that they've got this whole resource right above them. We can see through time. Astronomy is a strange subject in that you do a lot of your research by looking out in the skies and making equations rather than just working with raw materials on a laboratory desk.

"Even by looking into something simple as a telescope, you can see light that was emitted long ago."

Professor Kirschner is the author of The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos. His work with the "High-Z Supernova Team" on the acceleration of the Universe was dubbed the Science Breakthrough of the Year for 1998 by Science Magazine.

"It's quite difficult to explain to people that our universe is expanding at rates faster than we ever imagined 20 years ago.

"It goes against most people's understanding of gravity. When you throw something up in the air, you think it would have to come down. But it appears the universe is dominated by a mysterious dark energy that drives cosmic acceleration."

Professor Kirschner said it had been only in the last 20 years that astronomers are coming to terms with the phenomenon.

"It actually stretches back to 1917, when Albert Einstein proposed a "cosmological constant". He ditched that equation when it was discovered the universe was expanding, and not static.

"It was called his great blunder, and yet we're able to use that cosmological constant now to describe how dark energy dominates the universe."

- © Fairfax NZ News