Philip Perry | Big Think
In 2011, three researchers won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the universe expands at an ever-increasing rate. Americans Saul Perlmutter and Adam Ries and Australian Brian Schmidt made the discovery, while studying type 1a supernovae, in the late 1990s. This is a type of supernova which occurs when a white dwarf star dies in a gigantic explosion.
The scientists were actually part of two teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project in the US and the High-Supernova Search Team in Australia. Both examined supernovas (supernovae) and in doing so, discovered the same thing—that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They announced their findings within weeks of one another. How they found this out was that objects farther away from a supernova seemed to be moving faster than the event itself.
