Tag Archives: nobel prize in physics

UA Alumnus Wins Nobel Prize

*Brian P. Schmidt, who graduated from the UA in 1989 with a double major in astronomy and physics, shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with two colleagues for a discovery that has rocked our understanding of the cosmos: The universe is expanding at an ever-faster pace.*

In the last years of the 20th century, two teams of researchers set out to race each other to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion, and by extension, unveil how the universe most likely will end.

University of Arizona alumnus Brian P. Schmidt, now a professor of astronomy at Australian National University who headed one of the teams, shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam G. Riess from Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. (more…)

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Berkeley Lab’s Saul Perlmutter wins Nobel Prize in Physics

BERKELEY, CA — Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.” Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

Perlmutter shares the prize with Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, leader of the High-z Supernova Search Team and first author of that team’s analysis, respectively, which led to their almost simultaneous announcement of accelerating expansion. (more…)

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