Alex Filippenko studies exploding stars and the use of supernovae as cosmological probes. He coauthored both major late-1990s analyses that compared distant Type Ia supernovae with nearby reference samples.
The technique connects a standardized supernova luminosity to its measured brightness, then compares the inferred luminosity distance with cosmological redshift. The distant events favored models with an accelerating cosmic expansion. Their interpretation required checking extinction and other systematic changes that could also make distant sources appear faint.[ref]
Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant by Adam Riess and others. Author list and abstract: supernova distances, cosmological fits and systematic tests
[ref]Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae by Saul Perlmutter and others. Author list and abstract: independent standardized supernova sample
Portrait of Alex Filippenko
. Jeffrey Silverman. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
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