Once we thought our world was the center of the Universe. Today we know we’re on a minor if privileged planet circling an average star in an inconspicuous spot in an unremarkable galaxy that’s just one of billions of galaxies occupying a Universe that stretches farther than we can see even with our biggest telescopes. But in the last few years telescopes like these here in Chile have shown us that we are even less at the center of the Universe than we could ever have imagined. You and me and these rocks and the sun that shines on us and the stars that twinkle overhead aren’t even built of the same stuff that most of the Universe is made of. And there’s a mysterious force out there in space that literally comes out of nowhere. It’s a force that seems to be pushing the Universe apart faster and faster until one day everything out there beyond our own little solar system will simply disappear into blackness. Our Universe and our place in it just got a whole lot weirder. A 2004 documentary – In 2011 Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess along with Brian Schmidt won the Nobel prize in Physics. The L. H. C. built in 2009 is now the largest accelerator in the world.
