Robert Nichol's Research Rated Top Discovery of the Year by Science Magazine

Research this year by Carnegie Mellon astrophysicist Robert Nichol and a team of collaborators at the University of Pittsburgh and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been selected by Science magazine as the number one breakthrough of 2003.

Nichol's work leads the magazine's annual ranking of the top 10 scientific discoveries in its Dec. 19 issue.

Last July, Nichol and his colleagues announced their discovery of dark energy's "shadow" on the ancient cosmic radiation, a relic of the cooled radiation from the Big Bang. They achieved their finding by correlating millions of galaxies in the SDSS against the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation as measured by NASA's orbiting Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. (see http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/030725_darkenergy.html).

Together with earlier WMAP findings on CMB radiation, the work "ends a decades-long argument about the nature of the universe," according to Science.

Lauren Ward