Exploring Supernovae Leads to Physics Nobel Prize

"Last month, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered that, since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate. Before the discovery, scientists assumed that gravity slowed down the expansion of the universe. But the data collected by one team led by astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and another team led by physicist Brian Schmidt indicated otherwise."

"When we started getting results that showed that it was not slowing ... [that] in fact it wasn't slowing at all — it was speeding up — it was a pretty big shock," says Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "At the time, when you first get those results, it doesn't worry you too much ... because you know you haven't finished doing the calibration. The more we did the calibration, the more the results didn't go away."