Australian scientist shares Nobel physics prize

Brian Schmidt

Australian National University (ANU) astronomer Brian Schmidt has been named a joint winner of the 2011 Nobel physics prize for research that discovered the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.

The US-born Australian shares the 10 million Swedish crowns $US1.5 million ($A1.58 million) prize money with two US scientists, Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.

Schmidt, 44, is the head of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University in Weston Creek, near Canberra.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that working in two separate research teams during the 1990s - Schmidt and Riess in one and Perlmutter in the other - the trio raced to map the universe's expansion by analysing a particular type of supernovas, or exploding stars.

They found that the light emitted by more than 50 distant supernovas was weaker than expected, a sign that universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, the academy said.

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said.

"However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding."

Riess, 42, is an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

Perlmutter, 52, heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Schmidt said he was just sitting down to have dinner with his family in Canberra when the phone call came from the academy.

"I was somewhat suspicious when the Swedish voice came on," Schmidt told The Associated Press. "My knees sort of went weak and I had to walk around and sort my senses out."

The academy said the three researchers were stunned by their own discoveries - they had expected to find that the expansion of the universe was slowing down. But both teams reached the opposite conclusion: far-away galaxies were racing away from each other at an ever-increasing speed.

The acceleration is believed to be driven by dark energy, one of the great mysteries of the universe.

The physics prize was the second Nobel to be announced this year. On Monday the medicine prize went to American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann who shared it with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman for their discoveries about the immune system. Steinman died three days before the announcement.

The prestigious Nobel Prizes were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and have been handed out since 1901.

The prizes are handed out every year on 10 December, on the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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