Harvard astronomers share dark prize

Two teams who upset everyone's ideas about how the universe works and its future will share the $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize for discovering that 70 percent of the universe is nothing but a strange form of energy.

In 1998, a group called the High-z Supernova Search Team published irresistible evidence that the universe is expanding at a rate that may never slow down. Eleven of the 19 members of the High-z team are or were affiliated with Harvard University. Months later, a second team, the Supernova Cosmology Project, independently confirmed the startling finding. That team was lead by Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley.

"We used observations of distant and nearby exploding stars [supernovae] to discover that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, as everyone thought, but speeding up," says Robert Kirshner, Clowes Professor of Science and Harvard College Professor of Astronomy. "This astonishing result has now been confirmed by other methods of observation and in just nine years has gone from incredible to being the standard view."