400 Years of the Telescope

American film “400 Years of The Telescope” documents the last 4 centuries of astronomy. The film was shown at the Pariscience Scientific Film Festival (held recently in Paris France).

Says Fris Koenig, the director of the film: “A lot of people think that we have solved all the mysteries of the universe, that there are no more mysteries. In a lot of ways we are the same way Galileo was, just with bigger mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. We call them dark because we don’t know where they are, but we can see the effects. Dark energy is the expansion of the universe, we though that the universe should be slowing down at this point, it is not, it is actually accelerating into the expansion. The second mystery is dark matter, the glue that holds galaxies together. We can see its effects, but we can’t see it in itself. So if we take dark matter and dark energy and add them up: it equals 96% of the Universe. It means that 96% of our cosmos is unknown to us.” Catherine Cesarsky is the French High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. She says: “In 10 years we have been able to sweep all the space that we can see in the Universe and you know that when we look at galaxies which are very far away, we see them as they were at the time they emitted their light, which means we see them as they were a long time ago, and so we can understand the history of the Universe.” The film is not on general release but more information is available at:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1231285/

More about: Astronomy, USA

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