Stellar rise for astronomer

An Australian National University astronomer who feared he’d have to abandon his study of the cosmos for a nine-to-five job has just received three high science honours.

Brian Schmidt is one of five ANU researchers due to be admitted to the prestigious Australian Academy of Science this week (Thursday, May 8). He got word last week that he had also been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. And last month he was one of 10 top Australian scientists to win a Thomson Scientific Citation Award recognising impact on international scientific research.

Based at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Professor Schmidt led an international team of scientists that made headlines world wide in 1998 with the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. The finding stunned the international scientific community. Previously, it was thought that the rate of recession of the galaxies was slowing as gravitational attractive forces overcame the force of the Big Bang that set the universe expanding 13.7 billion years ago. The result struck at the heart of Einstein’s theory of relativity and implied that a mysterious anti-gravity force - dubbed “dark energy” - was out there, pushing the galaxies apart.

“It was one of the biggest surprises of my life,” says Professor Schmidt, whose team based its findings on the study of supernovae, or exploding stars.

He is still working on the theory but these days spends much of his time overseeing the construction of SkyMapper - a powerful optical telescope to replace the historic Great Melbourne Telescope destroyed in the Mount Stromlo bushfires on January 18, 2003.

When he set out on a path to astronomy at the age of 18, he was resigned to the fact that he’d eventually have to leave his night job at a telescope to “do something normal”. “Astronomy seemed like a fairly extravagant profession to choose when I was 18,” he says.

Other ANU scholars elected to the Australian Academy of Science this year are Professor Murray Badger, Professor Roderick Boswell, Professor David Lindenmayer and Professor Hugh O’Neill.

ANU Media Office: Martyn Pearce + 61 2 6125 5575; 0416 249 245