Local astrophysicist Hinshaw honoured at ‘Oscars of Science’
UBC astrophysicist Gary Hinshaw is sharing a Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics for helping snap a “baby picture of the universe.”
Hinshaw and the 26 other scientists behind the NASA satellite Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) were able to determine that the universe is composed mainly of dark matter and dark energy — along with a smattering of the ordinary matter we can see — as well as estimate its age.
The annual Breakthrough Prize — known as the Oscars of Science — handed out seven US$3-million awards in a glossy, televised ceremony Sunday in Palo Alto, Calif., hosted by Morgan Freeman, with presentations by Mayim Bialik, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, among others.
Dozens of scientists were honoured for breakthroughs in life sciences, mathematics and fundamental physics, the category Hinshaw’s team won. The entire 27-member WMAP team will split their prize.
The prizes are funded by philanthropists including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, founder of the genomics firm 23andMe.
“It was not the typical milieu for scientists,” said Hinshaw of the red carpet-style event.
Hinshaw shared a table with Kutcher and Kunis, while Freeman emceed the show just metres away. He collected a few selfies with the stars, including one with the reigning Miss USA, chemist Kara McCullough.
“What an amazing and surreal night it was,” he said.
“I’ve never been involved in any event remotely close to this. It was completely extraordinary.”
Also extraordinary is WMAP’s ability to complete nine, oneyear time exposure images of the known universe.
The satellite has just two pixels for data collection and must scan the entire sky to gather data for each image. The quick turnaround from data collection to “snapshot” was made possible by crafty number-crunching algorithms that allowed the WMAP team to merge hundreds of millions of data points into an image of about one million pixels.
The now-famous images of the aftermath of the Big Bang confirmed the currently accepted standard model of cosmology and set the age of the universe at 13.77 billion years.
The discovery also opened multiple lines of inquiry into the nature of dark energy and dark matter that make up most of the substance of our universe.
“There could be a whole other periodic table for dark matter elements,” said Hinshaw.
“There’s no reason to think that dark matter would be all one thing.”
The WMAP satellite was launched in 2001 and spent the better part of a decade measuring radiation left over from the Big Bang, but Hinshaw spent a decade before that designing and testing data collection tools with reams of synthetic data.
Because the equipment leaves Earth, there is little opportunity to change or repair it.
“I started on this project in 1994, so I spent about 20 years in total on this project, a very good chunk of a career,” he said. “There is a significant risk (of failure) attached to a project like this, but once in a while, one pays off big, scientifically.”