Nobel prize for discovery that the universe is accelerating

Scientists who watched stars explode in faraway galaxies and deduced that the universe was expanding at an ever-faster rate have won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The discovery in the late 1990s meant textbooks had to be rewritten and forced researchers to consider a universe of stars and planets that is being torn apart by a mysterious force that counteracts gravity. The nature of the force that drives the growth of the cosmos is so mysterious that scientists named it "dark energy". It is thought to make up more than 70% of the universe.

Half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (£934,000) prize money went to the US physicist Saul Perlmutter, 52, and the other half to two members of a competing team that conducted similar work, the US-born researcher Brian Schmidt, 44, who is based in Australia, and another US scientist, Adam Riess, aged 42. The award was greeted with widespread approval from scientists, though some argued that by recognising only three physicists, the prize distorted how the research was done.