Next September 7th, during a public ceremony to be held in Cambridge (UK), the Gruber Cosmology Prize will be awarded jointly
to Saul Perlmutter of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, Brian
Schmidt of the Australian National University, and members of the two
international teams that these researchers led: the Supernova Cosmology
Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, for their discovery that the expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating.
As the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation recognizes... "these observations required the development of new techniques that use supernovae
exploding within distant galaxies to measure precise distances across a large fraction of the observable Universe. The discovery of the accelerated expansion has radically
changed our perception of cosmic evolution."
This outstanding result was achieved using the most powerful telescopes in the
world, and in particular, the members of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) team have been using the telescopes of the Isaac Newton Group
since the early nineties extensively. A special mention goes to Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona) and Nic Walton (formerly support astronomer at the
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes), who have been responsible for most of the data obtained with the ING telescopes. More recently Javier Méndez (ING)
joined the SCP team.
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One of the type Ia supernovae observed with the ING telescopes for the Supernova Cosmology Project. This image was obtained using
the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope in 1998. Credit: Javier Méndez (ING and University of Barcelona), Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona) and Nic Walton (ING) [ JPEG ]. |
The Supernova Cosmology Project's "Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42
high-redshift supernovae" paper appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1999. The
authors and their then-affiliations were Saul Perlmutter, Greg Aldering,
Gerson Goldhaber, Robert Knopf, Peter Nugent, Patricia Castro, Susana
Deustua, Sebastien Fabbro, Ariel Goobar, Donald Groom, Isobel Hook, Alex
Kim, Matthew Kim, Julia Lee, Nelson Nunes, Reynald Pain, Carl
Pennypacker, and Robert Quimby of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;
Chris Lidman of the European Southern Observatory; Richard Ellis, Mike
Irwin, and Richard McMahon of Cambridge University; M. Pilar
Ruiz-Lapuente of the University of Barcelona; Nicholas Walton of the
Isaac Newton Group, La Palma; Brad Schaefer of Yale University; Brian
Boyle of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Sydney; Alexei Filippenko and
Thomas Matheson of the University of California at Berkeley; Andrew
Fruchter and Nino Panagia of the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore; Heidi Newberg of Fermi National Laboratory; and Warrick Couch
of the University of New South Wales.
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