Australian National University astronomer Professor Brian Schmidt has received the Nobel Prize for Physics, sharing the prestigious award with two US scientists for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

 

Professor Schmidt, head of the High-z Supernova Search Team in Weston Creek, will share the award with Professor Adam Riess from Johns Hopkins University and Professor Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkely.

 

Working in two separate research teams during the 1990s — Perlmutter in one and Schmidt and Riess in the other — the scientists raced to map the universe's expansion by analyzing a particular type of supernovas, or exploding stars.

 

They found that the light emitted by more than 50 distant supernovas was weaker than expected, a sign that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, the academy said.

 

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said.

 

"However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."