![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 6-Sep-2007
Share
]
Looking for dark energy: the Gruber Cosmology Prize and NASA’s Beyond Einstein mission. The winners of Gruber Cosmology Prize available for interview in London and Cambridge on the prize, dark energy and their latest projects including Beyond Einstein missions and Skymapper. Also:
Media are welcome at each of these events.
Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt and their teams: the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team, will receive the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. The prize was announced on July 17 and they will receive it at the University of Cambridge on September 7.
An accelerating universe was a crazy result that was hard to accept. Yet, two teams, racing neck and neck, simultaneously came to the same conclusion. Their discovery led to the idea of an expansion force, dubbed dark energy. And it suggests that the fate of the universe is to just keep expanding, faster and faster.
Perlmutter, from the University of California at Berkeley is co-principal investigator on SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, or SNAP, a versatile space-borne observatory with a powerful two-meter-class telescope designed to study dark energy by recording the distance and redshift of some 2,000 Type Ia supernovae a year and mapping the sky with unprecedented resolution.
“Few questions are more fundamental or pressing than the mysterious nature of dark energy, which accounts for some three-quarters of the density of our universe -- but about which we know almost nothing," says Perlmutter.
Schmidt, from the Australian National University, is setting up SkyMapper: one of a new breed of surveying telescopes which are able to scan the nighttime skies more quickly and deeper than ever before. The SkyMapper telescope will provide a deep digital map of the southern sky which will allow astronomers to study everything from nearby objects such as asteroids in our solar system to the most distant objects in the universe called quasars.
He is also involved in plans for a series of radio telescopes planned for a very radio-quiet area in Western Australia which it is hoped will become the site for the Square Kilometre Array – a giant radio telescope.
For more information about the Gruber Prizes and the 2007 citations visit www.gruberprizes.org
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.