A trio of astronomers won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for discovering that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, a finding that implies that the cosmos will end in frozen nothingness. The three are Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the United States and US-Australian Brian Schmidt, who were honoured for findings that were — to their own admission — both a complete surprise and a little scary.
The young trio looked at so-called type 1a supernovae to set down a benchmark for the movement of light on a cosmological scale. This kind of supernova, also called a white dwarf, can in the matter of a few weeks emit as much light as an entire galaxy. But to their astonishment, the laureates found through observations of more than 50 distant supernovae that light from the dying stars was weaker than expected, meaning they were further away than anticipated.
They concluded that, instead of slowing down as previously believed, the expansion of the Universe that began after it was created by the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago was accelerating.