René Racine

A Universal Puzzle

A few months ago, a Québec astrophysicist from the Université de Montréal threw the whole galaxy into confusion. According to his research team's findings, the universe seemed to be too small for its age.

At a time when Québec astronomers were rarer than black holes, René Racine earned his PhD in astrophysics at the Universtiy of Toronto, went on to post-doctoral studies at the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories in the United States, and then undertook a teaching career in Toronto.

The Université de Montréal lured him back to Québec in 1976 with the offer of a full professorship in its Physics Department, and a mouthwatering challenge: to oversee its new Mont Megantic observatory. Racine rose to the occasion with so much success that he was appointed head of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation in 1980, a position he held until 1984.

During his years in Hawaii, Racine designed and perfected a high-resolution camera capable of tripling the precision of telescope photos. With this invention, he and his colleagues at Canada-France-Hawaii and the Hertzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria managed to measure the distance from Earth to a galaxy cluster in the constellation Virgo. The result? 47 million light years, or half the distance estimated according to the Big Bang theory.

So the universe, based on the age of stars and the speed at which our galaxy is travelling, may be smaller than we thought. René Racine has just tossed cosmologists a fine conundrum to think about. Now they have to find a solution to take all this new data into account and make sure the universe is unfolding as it should...

Sources : Québec Science, February 1995 and La Presse, January 6, 1995