The 2026 Gruber Cosmology Prize honors Alexei V. Filippenko, Ken'ichi Nomoto, and Stanford Woosley for their decades-long studies of supernovae—exploding stars that have proven invaluable in understanding the composition and evolution of the Universe.

Filippenko, Nomoto, and Woosley will evenly divide the $500,000 award, which they will receive on November 10 at the “Illuminating the Cosmos” conference at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and House of Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. The official citation honors them for “transforming supernovae from poorly understood stellar explosions into the basis for a quantitative, predictive, and empirically validated framework.”

The three recipients have studied supernovae through complementary approaches, Filippenko as an observer and Nomoto and Woosley as theorists.

Lunar craters in permanent shadow could be ideal locations for building the most stable optical lasers ever made. The ultrastable laser could provide a GPS-like signal enabling spacecraft to navigate the Moon’s surface and more. Jun Ye, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues describe their proposal in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The Moon’s frigid polar regions, where permanently shadowed craters reside, have a low-vibration, high vacuum environment that’s highly suitable for ultrastable lasers. Such a laser could lock its frequencies onto signals from optical atomic clocks on satellites, providing the first atomic timekeeping signal on an extraterrestrial body. Networks of these lasers could make possible highly precise measurements of the distance between satellites and the lunar surface and could potentially even detect gravitational waves passing through.

These polar regions, which are designated as possible landing sites for future missions in NASA’s Artemis program, remain central to long-term lunar exploration because they contain water-ice and other resources needed to maintain a human presence.