The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to the Supernova Cosmology Project, which used distant supernova to measure the expansion of the universe, and prove that the expansion is accelerating. The Supernova Cosmology Project was a big job, and it has 32 co-authors, including M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente from the University of Barcelona, who contributed observations from the William Herschel Telescope and the Isaac Newton Telescope, both at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma.
M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente’s name isn’t on the Nobel Prize – that honour goes to the team leader Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who shares the prize with two people from the High-z Supernova Search Team.
The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, 13,700,000,000 years ago. Until recently, physicists thought that gravity must be slowing down this expansion. The work done by the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team showed that it is accelerating. Cosmologists are having a wonderful time trying to work out what the fudge is going on.
