The accelerating universe is the observation that the universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. In formal terms, this means that the cosmic scale factor has a positive second derivative, so that the velocity at which a distant galaxy is receding from us should be continuously increasing with time. In 1998, observations of type Ia supernovae also suggested that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating since around redshift of z~0.5. The 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics were both awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess for the 1998 discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.
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