Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe

World-renowned astronomer and prize-winning professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, Alex Filippenko, explores some of the mysteries of the universe at a special lecture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Filippenko discusses observations of very distant exploding starts called super-novae that provide intriguing evidence that the expansion of the universe is now speeding up. Over the largest scales of space, the universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive "dark energy" of unknown origin, stretching the very fabric of space itself faster and faster with time.