Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and a professor in physics and astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, today was awarded the 2011 Einstein Medal by the Albert Einstein Society, located in Bern, Switzerland. The Society recognized him for leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team’s 1998 discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe.
Riess (pronounced “Reese”), 40, shares this year’s prize with Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project team published similar results shortly after those published by Riess and High-z team member Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University. Both teams shared the Peter Gruber Foundation’s 2007 Cosmology Prize — a gold medal and $500,000 — for the discovery of dark energy, which Science Magazine called “The Breakthrough Discovery of the Year” in 1998. The researchers also shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in astronomy for the same discovery.
Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. 410-338-4514villard@stsci.edu
Oli Usher Hubble/ESA, Garching, Germany 011-49-89-4300-6855ousher@eso.org
Space related activities and anniversaries for February 21 – February 27 2011. Fetched live every week from NASA JPL
If you want the complete list going more than a year ahead then see the Space Calendar at NASA JPL.
The search for planets outside our solar system continues to heat up. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has located more than 1,200 planetary candidates, however confirming them remains a challenge. In some circumstances, an eclipsing binary star can mimic the shallow dimming due to a planet crossing in front of its star. Ground-based measurements are needed to verify an orbiting world by spotting the gravitational wobbles it induces in its host star, in a method known as radial velocity.