Freedman, Kennicutt and Mould share $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize

		IMAGE: Wendy Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California. The 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize will be awarded to Freedman, Kennicutt and Mould for their... Click here for more information.

The recipients of the 2009 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation are Wendy Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California, USA; Robert Kennicutt, director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England; and Jeremy Mould, professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Physics, Australia. These three renowned astronomers are being honoured for their leadership in the definitive measurement of the value of the Hubble constant, one of the most important numbers in astronomy. The Hubble constant indicates the rate at which the Universe has been expanding since the "Big Bang", thus connecting the Universe's age with its size. The Cosmology Prize was the first to be awarded when the Gruber international Prize Program was inaugurated in 2000, and its tenth anniversary, which the Foundation will celebrate this summer, coincides with the International Year of Astronomy.