Accelerating Expansion

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley [National:state] Lab, Brian Schmidt at the Australian National Lab and Adam Reiss at Johns Hopkins. The Royal Swedish Academy's Olga Botner:"In a universe which is dominated by matter, one would expect gravity eventually should make the [expansion:explosion] slow down. Imagine then the utter [astonishment:thrill] when two groups of [scientists:researchers] headed by this year's Nobel [laureates:prizes] in 1998 discovered that the expansion was not slowing down, it was actually accelerating. By [comparing:making] the brightness of distant, far-away supernovae with the brightness of nearby supernovae, the scientists discovered that the far-away supernovae were about 25 percent too faint. They were too far away. The universe was accelerating. And so this discovery is [fundamental:theoretical] and a milestone for cosmology. And a challenge for generations of scientists to come."