Cosmology work captures 2011 Physics Nobel

from Reuters:

Honoring two global teams of stargazers who shook cosmology to its foundations in 1998, the Nobel Committee said Americans Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess had shown how the universe that emerged from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago may fly apart so far, cooling as it goes, that it "will end in ice."

Their work gave birth to the theory of dark energy -- a kind of inverse gravity, that causes the expansion to accelerate. Up to three quarters of the universe seems to comprise dark energy -- but just what it is is a matter of speculation, notably at facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva. Many hope an answer could reconcile apparent anomalies in physics.