When Brian Schmidt heard he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics he thought it was a practical joke by some of his graduate students.
But the late-night phone call, from a Swedish-accented woman, was genuine.
Professor Schmidt, a Canberra astronomer, was told he and United States scientists Saul Perlmutter and Adam Reiss would be sharing the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.
Professor Schmidt and his team tracked how the universe had expanded over time.
They had expected that gravity would slow down the growth of the universe.
