Three Capture Nobel Prize in Physics for Expanding Universe

For scientists it doesn’t get any bigger than the Nobel Prize. This year’s winners in the Physics category receive the honor for work they did on the biggest subject available to them or anyone — the universe.

Three U.S. scientists are sharing the prize for their theory of a rapidly expanding universe. Saul Perlmutter receives half the prize for his role in discovering that the light from a specific kind of supernova was dimmer than predicted. Fortunately, another team studying the same thing made up of Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss came to the same conclusion.

For over 100 years physicists — most notably Albert Einstein — had been working with the idea that the universe was expanding, stretching outward as a result of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. But until the new Nobel Prize winners used better technology, more powerful computers and telescopes in the 1990′s the theory lacked observation.

In 1998, the universe was still rapidly expanding and the answer to that big question was literally written in the stars.

In a telephone interview this morning with the Nobel Prize committee, Dr. Reiss remembered first seeing the sign that proved Einstein and others’ theory.

After sifting through all the data he gathered for his experiment looking at class 1a supernovae, he says, “I remember thinking the sign of the answer was I would have said, wrong. I remember thinking, ‘uh, I made a terrible mistake.’”

At the time, Reiss and his team at John Hopkins were seeing the same thing that Perlumutter and his team at University of California Berkeley were observing. Both teams thought there were errors in their calculations and it took a long time to confirm the results. Once the teams shared their results with each other, they knew their discovery was big.

Now the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The trio was honored Tuesday for their work confirming that the universe is indeed expanding but also for realizing that the rate is ever-accelerating over time.

According to the Nobel press release, “The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

“The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.”