Swinburne astronomer at Nobel ceremony

Professor Warrick Couch, Director of Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, has been invited to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. 

The invitation recognises the contribution Professor Couch made to the discovery that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate – research that earned Professor Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University, and two prominent US astronomers, Professor Adam Riess and Professor Saul Perlmutter the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The incredible discovery came about when two research teams were simultaneously searching for exploding stars, called supernovae.

One of the teams, headed by Professor Perlmutter, set to work in 1988. This team included Professor Couch, who undertook observations using the 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales, as well as telescopes in the Canary Islands and Chile.

The other team launched at the end of 1994, headed by Professor Schmidt, with Professor Riess also playing a crucial role.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations when the two research teams simultaneously presented their findings – they had found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected, showing that the expansion of the Universe was actually accelerating.

The discovery led to a revival of the concept of ‘dark energy’, as a possible cause for the Universe’s accelerating expansion. 

Throughout his career Professor Couch has continued to investigate dark energy, one of the greatest enigmas in physics. Earlier this year, he was part of a team that confirmed that dark energy is in fact real. Led by Swinburne, the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, which took four years to complete, used two other kinds of observations to provide an independent check on the supernovae results from a decade earlier.

Professor Couch is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Gruber Cosmology Prize recipient and a HiCi (high citation) researcher, an honour awarded to researchers whose citations rank them in the top 0.5 per cent of researchers in their field globally. 

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