Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

This year’s Gruber Prize in Cosmology has been awarded to the two teams that used distant supernovae — exploding stars that are nearly “standard candles” — to be the first to conclusively determine that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, likely due to something very much like Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant”. (Or, at least, among the first to observe the accelerated expansion, since Ostriker and Steinhardt had already dubbed the model “Cosmic Concordance” back in 1995, and even I managed to stake a claim, well before the Supernova data were in.)

One of the interesting things about the Gruber Prize is that the funds are given not only to the Principal Investigators, Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter, but half of the funds are shared amongst the entire teams involved. So congratulations to everyone involved, and enjoy!