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This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of
cosmic acceleration using supernova explosions. This talk will
explain why exploding white dwarfs make good distance indicators, show
how cosmic acceleration was detected and confirmed, and suggest ways
to make more accurate and precise measurements to constrain the nature
of the dark energy by making the supernova observations at infrared
wavelengths. At present, all the evidence is consistent with dark
energy that has the same properties as the cosmological constant that
Einstein invented and discarded 80 years ago, but the numerical value
of this vacuum energy is exceedingly small.
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