Most Active Stories Mon November 14, 2011 Exploring Supernovas
Leads To Physics Nobel Prize Last month, the Nobel Prize for
physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered that,
since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an
accelerating rate. Before the discovery, scientists assumed that
gravity slowed down the expansion of the universe. But the data
collected by one team led by astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and
another team led by physicist Brian Schmidt indicated otherwise.
"When we started getting results that showed that it was not
slowing ... [that] in fact it wasn't slowing at all — it was
speeding up — it was a pretty big shock," says Perlmutter, an
astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "At
the time, when you first get those results, it doesn't worry you
too much ... because you know you haven't finished doing the
calibration. The more we did the calibration, the more the
results didn't go away." Perlmutter, Schmidt and Adam Riess, who
played a crucial role on