The Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University Professor Ian Chubb has congratulated astronomer Professor Jeremy Mould on his winning the 2009 Cosmology Prize of the US-based Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation – one of the world’s most prestigious astronomy accolades.
Professor Mould did his PhD research at ANU in the 1970s and, having established his career in the USA, returned as Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU, where he carried out the work for which he receives the Gruber Prize for Cosmology. This work helped define the Hubble constant, one of the most important numbers in astronomy. Professor Mould is now a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.
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.
Professor Mould will share the US$500,000 prize with Wendy Freedman, Director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California; and Robert Kennicutt, Director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.
“There are few more fundamental fields of inquiry than exploring the origins and scope of our universe,” Professor Chubb said. “Professor Mould and his colleagues have made a profound contribution to our knowledge, and they are to be heartily congratulated for this.”
This is the second time the Gruber prize has been awarded to a researcher for work conducted at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU. In 2007 Professor Brian Schmidt received the honour, along with Professor Saul Perlmutter at UC Berkley, for their independent efforts to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
“We are proud that another of our colleagues has been recognised by the Gruber foundation,” said current RSAA Director Professor Harvey Butcher. “Professor Mould made a strong contribution during his time as Director here at Mt Stromlo, and continues to add to our understanding of the cosmos. He is a role model for us astronomers and an asset for Australia.”
Professors Mould, Freedman and Kennicutt led the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, one of the three major projects of the Hubble Space Telescope when it was launched in 1990. Working with a team of more than two dozen astronomers at 13 different institutions around the world, they determined that the best value of the Hubble constant is 72 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of only 10 per cent. This finding means the universe is 14 billion years old – which agrees with the age estimates for the oldest stars.
