Physics Nobel goes to discoverers of dark energy

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences : Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1998 of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Perlmutter, who’s affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, led one of the two independent and rival teams that made the discovery. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra led the other team, which includes Riess of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Both teams surveyed a certain type of near-uniform supernovae to determine that the expansion of the universe is being driven not by mass, as had been widely assumed, but by an additional and larger source of energy. Although the source of the cosmic acceleration, which is popularly known as dark energy, remains a mystery, the acceleration itself has been confirmed by other observational methods.