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Russian scientists win Gruber Cosmology Prize

Tuesday, 16. July 2013 - 17:21

Two Russian scientists have been selected to receive the 2013 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their formative contributions to inflationary theory. According to the Prize citation, the theoretical work of Viatcheslav Mukhanov, full professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, and Alexei Starobinsky, the principal research scientist at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, "changed our views on the origin of our Universe and on the mechanism of its formation of structure."

Russian scientists have provided a compelling solution to two of the essential questions of cosmology: "Why is the structure of the Universe so uniform on the largest scales? Where did the departures from uniformity - such as galaxies, planets, and people - come from?"

According to International Astronomical Union's press-release, they made a "profound contribution to inflationary cosmology and the theory of the inflationary perturbations of the metric of space time. This theory, explaining the quantum origin of the structure of our Universe, is one of the most spectacular manifestations of the laws of quantum mechanics on cosmologically large scales."

The Inflation Theory proposes a period of extremely rapid expansion of the universe during its first few moments. It was developed around 1980 to explain several puzzles with the standard Big Bang theory, in which the universe expands relatively gradually throughout its history, NASA's website reads.
Mukhanov and Starobinsky will share the $500 000 award, which will be presented on 3 September 2013 as part of the COSMO 2013 conference at the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge, UK.

The Gruber Prize in Cosmology is one of five international awards made by an American non-profit organization, The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, co-sponsored by the International Astronomical Union.

Source: 
rbth.asia
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Gruber Cosmology Prize