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2009 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science
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Background Information on the 2009 Theme: The Cosmos
Starting with Copernicus, we have moved from believing in a geocentric Universe to regarding Earth as an ordinary planet orbiting a mid-sized star that belongs to a typical galaxy. Might the next step be to consider this Universe we are studying as an ordinary one? Propelled by theoretical advances, technological developments and extraordinary experiments, cosmology has come of age, but many questions remain unanswered.
Though numerous alternatives exist for dating the history of observational cosmology, ranging from Galileo's 1609 examination of the sky with the newly invented telescope to Hubble's late 1920s determination of the correlation between stellar distances and the redshifts of their spectra implying the universe's expansion, the date usually selected for early cosmology's experimental study is 1964. That year marks the report by Penzias and Wilson of the existence of isotropically distributed radiation, apparently produced by a system in thermal equilibrium.
Quickly interpreted as being due to radiation whose distribution had been formed at the time the Universe had cooled to the point of atom formation, the so-called CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) ushered in the modern era of cosmology, confirming as well that the Universe originated in a cataclysmic explosion, one colloquially known as the Big Bang. Since then we have determined the early history of the Universe with ever-greater precision through the use of telescopes, instrumented balloons and dedicated satellites. These have not only confirmed the original picture but, by their exquisite precision, have revealed the small anisotropies that presumably led to formation of the structures we now observe, e.g. galaxies. But startling puzzles have also continued to arise, making cosmology one of the most exciting fields in science.
The notion of a Big Bang beginning has been universally accepted and the picture of what happened in its immediate aftermath is emerging with considerable clarity, but we are being increasingly forced to recognize our ignorance of the Universe's contents. Recent measurements strongly suggest that luminous matter is only a fraction, perhaps 20% of the Universe's total matter content. The identity of the remainder, the so-called dark matter, is still a mystery. Furthermore and even more surprising, the Universe's energy content is, by a factor of roughly three to one, apparently not due to matter at all. Something else, known as dark energy, dominates that balance, causing the present Universe's expansion to accelerate because of its outward gravitational pressure.
Nor are these the only puzzles. The formation of galaxies, clusters and even super- clusters of galaxies continues to draw considerable attention to our study of the cosmos. The presence of supermassive black holes has turned out to be crucial in galactic settings and new stellar forms continue to be discovered. The very existence of black holes challenges our understanding of how and why nature contains such singularities.