In October, Adam Riess ‘92 learned that he had won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for his observations of distant supernovas, which helped reveal that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Riess, now a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University, shared the prize with Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter, who each headed research teams that presented evidence of the phenomenon in 1998. Riess was part of Schmidt’s international High-z Supernova Search Team.
For almost a century, the universe had been known to be expanding. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating was “astounding,” according to the Nobel committee.
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