AlQa'dah 6, 1432, Oct 4, 2011, SPA - The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was Tuesday awarded to three researchers for "the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Half the 10-million-kronor (1.4-million-dollars) prize was awarded to Saul Perlmutter of the United States; while Brian Schmidt, who holds Australian and US citizenship, and Adam Riess of the US shared the other half. Perlmutter is at the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, in Berkeley. Schmidt is at the High-z Supernova Search Team at Australian National University in Weston Creek. And Riess is with the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, US. "The research teams raced to map the universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors, opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle," the academy said in its citation, according to a report of the German Press Agency"DPA". The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova - an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the sun but as small as the Earth. The teams found more than 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected, and "this was a sign that the expansion of the universe was accelerating," the academy said.
