Fwd: Special Riverside Astronomical Society Speaker Jan 31 - Please come!
Tytan Campbell
From: Richard Debus <deb...@ucr.edu>
Date: Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 12:33 PM
Subject: Special Riverside Astronomical Society Speaker Jan 31 - Please come!
To: Tytan Campbell <pres...@temeculavalleyastronomers.com>
Hi Tytan,
On January 31, the Riverside Astronomical Society is hosting a particularly exciting speaker at its monthly meeting: Alex Filippenko, legendary speaker and professor from UC Berkeley. You and members of the Temecula Valley Astronomers are invited to attend. Could you distribute the attached flyer to your members and perhaps display it in an upcoming newsletter or at an upcoming meeting? I have attached both pdf and jpg versions of the flyer for these purposes. I have also attached a map to the meeting room at La Sierra University in Riverside The meeting is free and parking is free.
In addition to the flyer, I include below a brief biography of Alex Filippenko and a brief abstract of his talk.
Thanks!
Best Wishes,
Rick Debus, President
Riverside Astronomical Society
You are invited!
Meeting of the Riverside Astronomical Society
January 31, 2026, La Sierra University, Riverside
E. E. Cossentine Hall, 7 to 9 PM
Speaker: Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)
Title: The Accelerating Universe and the Hubble Tension
Alex Filippenko is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists and is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe in 1998, a discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders, as well as the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. Voted the “Best Professor” on the UC Berkeley campus a record 9 times, in 2006 he was named the Case/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, and in 2022 he received the American Astronomical Society’s Education Prize. He has produced 5 astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 120 television documentaries.
Speaker’s Abstract: We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the Universe is expanding. But in 1998, two essentially independent research teams made a stunning discovery: the expansion of the Universe must be speeding up with time rather than decelerating. Over the largest distances, the Universe seems to be dominated by a mysterious, repulsive “dark energy” that makes up about 70% of its contents and stretches space itself progressively faster – a “runaway Universe.” Our most recent surprise, however, is that the current expansion rate we measure is faster than that predicted from observations of the young Universe, even taking into account the known acceleration. This “Hubble tension” suggests the possibility of exciting new physics beyond the standard model of cosmology.
The meeting is free and parking is free. See attached for map to E. E. Cossentine Hall at La Sierra University.
For more information, contact Rick Debus at pres...@rivastro.org .
Richard J. Debus, Professor and Lead Faculty Undergraduate Advisor for Biochemistry
Department of Biochemistry
University of California, Riverside
https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/debusrj
