The Nobel Prize committee today announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics has been won by three astronomers for the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. Saul Perlmutter (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) led the Supernova Cosmology Project while Brian Schmidt (Australian National University) and Adam Riess (Johns Hopkins/Space Telescope Science Institute) were leading members of the High-z Supernova Search team. Present (Chris Smith) and past (Mark Phillips, Nick Suntzeff, Mario Hamuy, Bob Schommer) CTIO staff members were also members of the High-z team. Both teams announced their results in 1998. This unexpected finding led to the idea that the acceleration is driven by the mysterious dark energy and that the Universe we see (stars etc) are a very minor component.

We can feel very proud at CTIO, for both teams used the Blanco telescope and prime focus imagers in the period 1994-1998 for some of their most critical observations. And prior to this, important precursor observations were made on the Curtis Schmidt telescope by Mario Hamuy and Jose Maza (U. Chile). CTIO staff, both scientific and technical, were crucial in providing the support that allowed these very difficult observations to be made successfully. At that time, the Blanco telescope plus Big Throughput Camera was the most powerful CCD camera in the world, and with the Dark Energy Camera and later LSST, we will continue to play a leadership role in such exciting studies.