Studies of Universe’s Expansion Win Physics Nobel Prize: Three US-born citizens won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, October 4, for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Their discovery created a new picture of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed. Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Ries discovered that the acceleration is driven by dark energy, a cosmic force that is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Their research implies that billions of years from now, the universe will become “a very, very large, but very cold and lonely place.” The discovery was the biggest shakeup in physics in the last 30 years.
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