Adam Riess

Date of Birth: December 16, 1969

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius

Biography

Adam Guy Riess is an American astrophysicist renowned for his groundbreaking work in observational cosmology. Born in Washington, D.C., Riess has made significant contributions to our understanding of the universe’s expansion. He is best known for his leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team, which discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, a finding that revolutionized the field of cosmology and led to the concept of dark energy. For this work, Riess, along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. Riess earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University. He has held academic positions at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Currently, he is a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University and a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

5 Interesting Facts about Adam Riess

1. Adam Riess won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

2. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996, where his thesis focused on using Type Ia supernovae as cosmological probes.

3. Riess is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

4. His work on dark energy has been cited over 50,000 times, making him one of the most influential scientists in his field.

5. Riess is actively involved in the Hubble Space Telescope’s efforts to measure the Hubble constant, a key number in cosmology.

5 Most Interesting Quotes from Adam Riess

1. “The universe is a much stranger place than we ever imagined.”

2. “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

3. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

4. “The discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating was like finding out the car you thought was running out of gas is actually speeding up.”

5. “Dark energy is the biggest mystery in physics today.”