Saul Perlmutter the 51 year old US astrophysicist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been awarded the Nobel prize for Physics along with two others, for their discovery that the universe’ expansion is speeding up instead of slowing down as has long been held. Perlmutter a professor of physics at the University of California aims now to gain a better understanding of the universes’ acceleration rate. Perlmutter is the leading investigator in the Supernova/Acceleration Probe project, designing a satellite dedicated to finding and studying the distant universe for more supernovae. The three winners of the award have shown how the universe emerged from the Big Bang. Dark energy, a theory that emerged as a result of the discovery, is an inverse gravity making up 75% of the universe, causing the accelerated expansion.

 

Inspired by Robert Sanders http://ow.ly/6Tvgp image source supervova.lbl.gov http://ow.ly/6TvID