Who knew there was so much money in dark energy?
Two teams of astronomers who discovered that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious something called dark energy had already shared a Nobel Prize and the $1 million Shaw Prize, among other honors. Now they have won the richest science prize of all.
On Sunday night they were handed the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, an award established by the Russian Internet investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner in a quest to make science as glitzy as rock 'n' roll.
The award to the astronomers is part of the 2015 Breakthrough Prizes, 12 in all, totaling $36 million, announced Sunday night at a black-tie gala in Mountain View, Calif., hosted by Seth MacFarlane.
In addition to the physics prize, six scientists were awarded Life Sciences Prizes for work on such topics as the regulation of genes and treating Parkinson's disease. Five mathematicians named as winners during the summer were also honored. Each of those prizes are $3 million.
A separate set of honors - the New Horizons Prizes, three awards worth $100,000 apiece and given for work with a promising future - were also announced at the gala on Sunday. Seven physicists will share these three prizes.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Google's Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki; Alibaba's Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang; Yuri and Julia Milner; and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The recipients are selected by a committee of previous winners.
The Life Sciences winners were Charles David Allis of Rockefeller University; Alim Louis Benabid of the Clinatec Institute in Grenoble, France; Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umea University in Sweden; Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School; and Gary Ruvkun of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Allis has investigated how the bundle of proteins known as chromatin in which DNA is wrapped and packaged can control the expression of genes, leading to insights about biology and diseases like cancer.
Dr. Benabid developed surgical techniques to deliver high-frequency electrical impulses to deep brain tissue as a way to quiet the tremors of Parkinson's.
Drs. Charpentier and Doudna, working together, showed how a protein that helped ancient bacteria maintain immunity from foreign DNA by chopping it out could be used to edit genetic sequences.
Working both independently and collaboratively, Drs. Ambros and Ruvkun discovered what the judges called 'a new world of genetic regulation.' They identified tiny strands of genetic material now known as microRNA, which regulate or modify the larger RNA molecules on their way to making proteins.
The mathematicians - Simon Donaldson of Stony Brook University and Imperial College, London; Maxim Kontsevich of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris; Jacob Lurie of Harvard; Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Richard Taylor of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton - on Sunday got to dress up in black tie to receive the rest of their prizes, toroidal trophies by the sculptor Olafur Eliasson.
The New Horizons Prizes, for emerging work, were also split between theory and experiment. Philip C. Schuster and Natalia Toro, both of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, will share one of the $100,000 prizes for developing new methods to search for dark matter in the data from particle colliders.
The other two New Horizons Prizes involve one of the jazziest speculations in physics: the idea, suggested by string theory and black holes, that the world is a hologram, like the pictures on credit cards in which the illusion of three dimensions has been encoded on a two-dimensional surface.
One consequence of this notion is that there are mathematical connections, called dualities, between what had been thought to be unrelated phenomena - between black holes and hot gas, for example, or between string theory and solid atomic matter.
These dualities offer physicists the chance of going around intractable problems of calculation in one system by solving the easier equations in another - a cottage industry in physics today.
One of these prizes is going to Sean Hartnoll of Stanford, who has been using black hole physics to investigate the properties of exotic materials like high-temperature superconductors. The third New Horizons award will be split four ways, among Horacio Casini and Marina Huerta, both of the Balseiro Institute at the National University of Cuyo in Argentina; Shinsei Ryu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Tadashi Takayanagi of Kyoto University.
The prize for dark energy is the first of Mr. Milner's Fundamental Physics awards to be given for experimental work, breaking a pattern that some critics have called a preponderance of awards to East Coast string theorists. Two teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, were competing to measure how cosmic gravity was slowing the expansion of the universe when they simultaneously concluded that it was inexplicably speeding up, as if nature had hit the gas pedal instead of the brake five billion years ago.
In all, 50 astronomers were involved in the research, and all will get a piece of the prize. Each team will get $1.5 million. Dr. Perlmutter is getting a third of his team's prize, with the rest being split equally. Drs. Schmidt and Riess will each get a sixth of their team's prize.
Reached by email, Dr. Perlmutter said the award was a celebration of the teamwork that 'brought a whole subfield's expertise together to catch the universe in the act of once again behaving even more bizarrely than we thought possible.'
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