Adam Riess

Adam Riess (born 1969) is an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is widely known for his research in using supernovae as Cosmological Probes.

Education

Riess graduated from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. Riess' PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and resulted in measurements of over twenty new type Ia supernovae and a method to make Type Ia supernovae into accurate distance indicators by correcting for intervening dust and intrinsic inhomogeneities.

Work

Riess was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before moving on to the Space Telescope Science Institute in 1999. He took up his current position at Johns Hopkins University in 2005.

Riess led the study in 1998 (first author) for the High-z Supernova Search Team which first reportedevidence that the Universe's expansion rate is now accelerating. This result was also found by the Supernova Cosmology Project.The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science Magazine in 1998.

Riess leads the Higher-Z SN Search program which uses the Hubble Space Telescope to discover the most distant supernovae yet uncovered by human kind. This team has traced the Universe's expansion back more than 10 billion light years. The key finding has been the detection of an early phase of decelerating expansion causing the most distant supernovae to look relatively brighter and thus disfavoring significant astrophysical dimming of supernovae. This result thus confirms the dark energy-dark matter model as perceived from supernovae.

Awards

Riess received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Trumpler Award in 1999, Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2001, the American Astronomical Society's Helen B. Warner Prize in 2003, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in 2004, and in 2006, he shared the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy, these last three for the discovery of cosmic acceleration. Brian P. Schmidt and all the members of the High-Z Team (as defined by the co-authors of Riess et al. 1998) shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, a $500,000 award, with the Supernova Cosmology Project (the set defined by the co-authors of Perlmutter et al. 1999) for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Riess was the winner of Macarthur "Genius" Grant in 2008.

See also

* Cosmological constant
* Dark energy

External links

* [http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/27/ Dark Energy Co-Discoverer Adam Riess Shares Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006]