February 9: Our Expanding Universe

Two international teams of astronomers announced on this date in 1998 that the observable galaxies in our universe are flying apart at accelerating speeds, implying the existence of an unknown, self-propelling property of space that Albert Einstein had predicted and named the “cosmological constant.” Two of the three team leaders, Saul Perlmutter at the Berkeley National Laboratory, and Adam Riess of the High-z Supernova Search Team in Australia, are Jews, and they along with Brian P. Schmidt were awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for their work. Astronomers from Chile, England, France, Germany, and Sweden were also involved in the research, which found evidence in the traces of ancient, exploding stars. Also on this date, in 1848, Caroline Lucretia Herschel died at age 98 in Germany. She was the daughter of a Jewish oboist father, and was the sister of the famed astronomer William Herschel. Together they discovered and named Uranus; on her own, Caroline found three nebulae and eight comets. A crater on the moon is named for her.