Saturday, July 21, 2007

Gruber Cosmology Prize

Cosmic Log points us to a press release on the $500,000 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for the discovery that the universe is accelerating. Here's information from the press release about past winners of the prize:

2006: John Mather and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Team for studies confirming that our universe was born in a hot Big Bang

2005: James E. Gunn for leading the design of a silicon-based camera for the Hubble Space Telescope and developing the original concept for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

2004:Alan Guth and Andrei Linde for their roles in developing and refining the theory of cosmic inflation

2003: Rashid Alievich Sunyaev for his pioneering work on the nature of the cosmic microwave background and its interaction with intervening matter

2002: Vera Rubin for discovering that much of the Universe is unseen black matter, through her studies of the rotation of spiral galaxies

2001: Martin Rees for his extraordinary intuition in unraveling the complexities of the universe

Allan R. Sandage and Phillip J. E. (Jim) Peebles: Sandage for pursuing the true values of the Hubble constant, the deceleration parameter and the age of the universe; Peebles for advancing our understanding of how energy and matter formed the rich patterns of galaxies observed today