Perlmutter, Saul

Saul Perlmutter, (born 1959, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, U.S.), American physicist who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of dark energy, a repulsive force that is the dominant component (73 percent) of the universe. He shared the prize with astronomers Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess.

Perlmutter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1981, and he received a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. He remained at Berkeley in various positions, finally becoming a professor of physics in 2004.

Perlmutter’s work concentrated on using supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. During his time in graduate school, he became involved in a project that used a robotic telescope to search for Type II supernovae. However, in the late 1980s it became apparent that Type Ia supernovae would be better objects for determining distances to faraway galaxies. Beginning in 1988, Perlmutter began the Supernova Cosmology Project, which used large telescopes to search for supernovae. Perlmutter’s team found in 1998 that Type Ia supernovae that had exploded when the universe was younger were fainter than expected. Thus, the supernovae were farther away than expected. This finding implied that the expansion rate of the universe is faster now than it was in the past, a result of the current dominance of the repulsive action of dark energy. Schmidt and Riess’s team independently reached the same conclusion. The acceleration of the universe was a startling result that completely changed cosmology; the majority of the universe’s mass-energy was of a completely unknown nature.