"New views of the Universe"

Professor Dragan Huterer

Professor Dragan Huterer Source: Dražen Huterer RFE

In Nis (Serbia) last month, well known cosmologists Professor Dragan Huterer held a lecture looking at two of the forces that could push the universe apart: inflation, the proposed period of exponential expansion that the universe went through immediately after the big bang; and dark energy, the present-day force thought to be responsible for pushing the cosmos outward at an ever increasing rate.


Professor Huterer is a theoretical cosmologist, and works as a professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. Before Michigan he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, before that a postdoc in the Particle-Astrophysics Group at Case Western Reserve University, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, an undergraduate at MIT, and before that a student at Gimnazija "Ognjen Prica" in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (F Yugoslavia).

"Before I have got interested in cosmology, I have got interested in physics. I had a high school professor in Sarajevo, who sparked my interest with a combination of nonchalant lecturers and funny jokes. Somehow I found this stimulating and fun so I began doing physics problems in my spare time going through various books. I followed that up by by attending physics competitions throughout the school. Then at some point I read an article about cosmic inflation and its proponent Alan Guth, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had a profound effect on me and I became fascinated by cosmology ant the early universe. Several years later I was undergraduate at MIT .... Guth taught my first cosmology course and I was hooked." said Professor Huterer for SBS Serbian.
"I work on trying to understand the nature and properties of "dark energy", a mysterious component that makes up about 75% of the energy in the universe and makes it accelerate. This includes using type Ia supernova measurements, large-scale structure surveys, and cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies as tools of precision cosmology. I am also interested in testing the statistical isotropy of the universe (whether, on average, it looks the same in every direction we observe). And I study signatures of the early universe in the present-day astronomical observations, applying various methods to learn about the universe moments after the Big Bang."

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