Perlmutter, Saul

Perlmutter, 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. Perlmutter was a co-recipient, with 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.
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 and Brian SchmidtSchmidt, Brian Paul,
1967–, Australian-American astrophysicist, b. Missoula, Mont., Ph.D. Harvard, 1993. He has been associated with Australian National Univ. since 1995.
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, of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Two teams, one led by Perlmutter and the other by Schmidt and Riess, 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
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 as distance indicators and found that a large number of these stellar explosions were dimmer than expected. Their findings demonstrated that the expansion of the universe is speeding up and suggest that the universe is likely infinite in space and time.