Astronomer Is Co-Winner of Million-Dollar Shaw Prize
Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess and two colleagues
today were awarded this year's $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy
for their discovery that an unexplained, mysterious "dark
energy" is driving an ever-faster expansion of the universe.
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Adam Riess |
Riess,
36, who is also an astronomer at the Space
Telescope Science Institute, said he learned of the award
in an e-mail message from a journalist in Hong Kong asking for
an interview. Later, a colleague called his home.
"He said, 'There's a thing on the fax machine'" from
the Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation saying he had won a
share of $1 million, Riess said. "I'm like, 'OK, hang onto
that.'"
This is the third year for the Shaw Prize, awarded annually
in three fields: astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical
sciences. The prize was established by Run Run Shaw, a philanthropist
and longtime leader in the Hong Kong film and television business.
This year's presentation ceremony will be held Sept. 12.
Co-winners of the 2006 astronomy prize with Riess are Saul Perlmutter
of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California,
Berkeley, and Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo Observatory
of the Australian National University in Canberra.
Riess and Schmidt were leaders of one team that pursued highly
difficult and challenging measurements that led to the dark energy
discovery in 1998. Perlmutter was the leader of a competing team.
"We set out to measure the expansion rate of the universe
in the past and compare it to the expansion rate of the present
universe, using exploding stars called supernovae," Riess
said. They expected to find that gravity — the force by
which everything in the universe tugs at everything else and
tends to attract it all together — had slowed the rate
of expansion over time.
"So it was startling to find that the expansion rate was
speeding up," Riess said.
That, he said, sent astronomers back to an idea developed but
eventually discarded by Albert Einstein as "my biggest blunder." That
idea, Riess said, implied that there might be a sort of "anti-gravity" — that "the
vacuum of space had energy in it and that energy could act repulsively
and accelerate the expansion of the universe."
"Today, we call this phenomenon 'dark energy,'" he
said. Though it may account for 70 percent of the universe, "we
still don't understand it very well," he said.
A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report referred to the nature
of dark energy as "the deepest mystery in physics" and
said, "Its resolution is likely to greatly advance our understanding
of matter, space, and time."
Riess said he, his colleagues and many other astronomers are
working to learn more, using the Hubble
Space Telescope and ground-based experiments. In 2003, for
example, Riess announced results from Hubble observations of
Type 1a supernovae. The new results indicated that a "cosmic
jerk" occurred 5 billion years ago, a transition from a
state in which gravity was predominant, putting thebrakes to
universal expansion, to a state in which dark energy took over
and began accelerating the expansion.
Riess and others are working with NASA and the Department of
Energy to explore the possibility of a Joint Dark Energy Mission,
a satellite with an array of instruments that would be dedicated
to exploring dark energy.
Riess, previously an adjunct associate professor, joined the
Johns Hopkins physics and astronomy faculty
full-time in January. He also has been an astronomer since 1999
with Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, the science
headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope. From 1996 to 1999,
he was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
Riess is a 1992 graduate of MIT, with a major in physics and
a minor in history. He earned his doctorate in astrophysics from
Harvard University in 1996.
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