Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

At less than half the cost of a single round trip in the space shuttle, NASA’s $200-million, seven-year-long Stardust mission to comet Wild 2 was an economical excursion into space. Yet Stardust scored a remarkable number of firsts:

Stardust returned the first solid samples from space since the 1970s moon missions;
These were [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA —George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been awarded the Daniel Chalonge Medal by the International School of Astrophysics “Daniel Chalonge,” known as the Chalonge School. The handsome bronze medal was awarded “for George Smoot’s 15-year support and outstanding contributions to the Chalonge School.” The school offers [...]

Scientific contact: Peter Nugent, (510) 486-6492, penugent@lbl.gov
Media contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — A group of scientists affiliated with the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS) have found startling evidence that there is more than one kind of Type Ia supernova, a class of exploding stars which until now has been regarded as [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — John Mather, Project Scientist of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission, and eighteen members of COBE’s Science Working Group, including George Smoot of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have jointly received the 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their ground-breaking studies of the cosmic microwave [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — NASA has announced that it will support an advanced mission concept study for the SNAP experiment, proposed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley for NASA and DOE’s Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM). [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — Saul Perlmutter is the winner of the 2006 International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences, awarded once every five years in this field by Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, one of whose earliest members was Galileo Galilei.

Saul Perlmutter’s methods of observation revealed the accelerating [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov, (510) 486-6249

BERKELEY, CA — Saul Perlmutter, a member of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and principal investigator of the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) project, has won the [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

Those who wander Berkeley Lab’s hallways or surf the Lab’s intranet are familiar with the art of Robin Lafever: spectacular images of the proposed SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) satellite; the Silicon Vertex Tracker built for the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s B-Factory; GRETINA, the most sensitive gamma-ray detector ever devised, [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — A team of astronomers led by Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel has published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky, encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

The final installment of a series reporting on the Supernova Workshop sponsored by SNAP, the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe collaboration, to investigate the best ways to study dark energy with exploding stars
Supernova cosmology was founded on measurements of distant Type Ia supernovae, and high-z searches for distant supernovae have continued to multiply, using [...]