Dark Energy Wins Nobel Prize in Physics
Supernova Red Shift and the Discovery of the Accelerating Universe Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory For today's Nobel Laureates in Physics, it was pretty much a matter of when, not if. When the three winners and their teams announced back in 1998 that the universe was not only expanding, but accelerating, they shook cosmology to its core: Their findings said the universe would end not with a bang, but a whimper. And the question of why - the mysterious force of dark energy, which accounts for about three-fourths of the mass-energy of the entire universe - is one of the greatest questions in modern science. Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess won for their shared discovery that the cosmos is expanding at an accelerating rate. They used ground and space telescopes to map the most distant Type Ia supernovae, and found these exploded stars seemed dimmer than they should have...