On April 10th, 2025, Liberty Science Center hosted Dr. Eric Gawiser, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Rutgers University, for a new Space Talk: Solving the Dark Energy Mystery with Distant Galaxies.

Our Universe has come a long way over its 13.9 billion year history – from its beginning as a single point of matter and energy to 96 trillion light-years across today. All this time, it has been shaped by invisible forces like Dark Energy, which makes up nearly 70% of the energy of the Universe. Figuring out the exact nature of Dark Energy is the work of astronomers like Dr. Gawiser.

During his Space Talk, Dr. Gawiser used the largest planetarium in the country to take us from the modern universe, all the way back to its infancy in the years after the Big Bang to see what we currently understand about the evolution of the Universe. From there, we visited the soon to open Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile to see how the revolutionary observatory will allow us to study dark energy better than ever before. Large telescopes, like the Rubin Observatory, are able to see the most distant galaxies in the Universe. The light from these galaxies has taken billions of years to reach us, along the way being bent and warped by invisible forces along the way. The Rubin Observatory is sensitive enough to detect incredibly small changes, allowing us to map the presence of dark energy and dark matter all throughout the history of the Universe.

At the conclusion of the Space Talk, attendees enjoyed sparking Dark Matter cocktails and conversation with Dr. Gawiser by the glow of the Science on a Sphere in the Weston Family Lab for Earth and Space Exploration.

Join us on May 29th for our next Space Talk, Orbits and Satellites: Rocket Science for Everybody, with Dr. Marla Geha, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University.