The ING Telescopes Contribute to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics
4 Oct 2011, 21:00 UTC
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) contributed data to the research which led to the award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Saul Perlmutter of UC-Berkeley.
Using wide-field imaging techniques implemented on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in the early nineties, and subsequent imaging and spectroscopy using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), among others,
the Supernova Cosmology Project team led by Perlmutter discovered that the expansion of the Universe, long-believed to be decelerating due to the effects of gravitational attraction, was in fact accelerating, that is,
galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago.
This result provided the foundation for the current, widely-accepted model of the Universe, in which the dynamics are dominated by what is called dark energy.
