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.

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