Schmidt, Brian Paul
Schmidt, Brian Paul,
1967–, Australian-American astrophysicist, b. Missoula, Mont., Ph.D. Harvard, 1993. He has been associated with Australian National Univ. since 1995. Schmidt and Adam RiessRiess, Adam Guy,1969–, American astrophysicist, b. Washington, D.C., Ph.D. Harvard, 1996. He has been an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., since 1999 and a professor at Johns Hopkins since 2006.
..... Click the link for more information. shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul PerlmutterPerlmutter, Saul,
1959–, American astrophysicist, b., Champaign-Urbana, Ill., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1986. He is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
..... Click the link for more information. for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Two teams, one led by Schmidt and Riess and the other by Perlmutter, independently used Type Ia supernovassupernova,
a massive star in the latter stages of stellar evolution that suddenly contracts and then explodes, increasing its energy output as much as a billionfold. Supernovas are the principal distributors of heavy elements throughout the universe; all elements heavier than
..... Click the link for more information. as distance indicators and found that a large number of these stellar explosions were dimmer than expected. This finding demonstrated that the expansion of the universe is speeding up and suggests that the universe is likely infinite in space and time.