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The announcement from Stockholm of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics is imminent 11.04am: Brian Schmidt: “It seemed too crazy to be right so we were a little scared. “I always look to Einstein because he got a lot right. Einstein’s idea that space itself has an energy is the simplest reason that the universe could be speeding up.” 11.02am: Nobel prize winner Brian Schmidt answering questions: “It feels like when my children were born…” 10.57am: More from the Nobel Assembly’s material: The growing rate of the expansion implies that the Universe is being pushed apart by an unknown form of energy embedded in the fabric of space. This dark energy makes up a large part of the Universe, more than 70 %, and it is an enigma, perhaps the greatest in physics today. No wonder, then, that cosmology was shaken at its foundations when two different research groups presented similar results in 1998. 10.54am: All three are relative youngsters for the Nobel prize. Perlmutter was born in 1959, Schmidt in 1967 and Reiss in 1969. 10.53am: One half of the prize goes to Saul Perlmutter at the Supernova Cosmology Project, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, California. The other half goes jointly to Brian Schmidt of the High-z Supernova Search Team at the Australian National University and Adam G. Riess at The High-z Supernova Search Team at Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore. 10.51am: This explanation from the Nobel Assembly: In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role. The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle. The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion. For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice. The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again. 10.50am: The prize is for discovering the expansion of the universe. 10.49am: From the Nobel Assembly: What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves. 10.45am The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, Adam G. Riess 10.45am: More Nobel prize trivia from @Nobelprize_org on twitter: Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. 10.44am: From @Nobelprize_org on twitter: Facts: 188 individuals have received the #NobelPrize in #Physics since 1901, among them, 2 are women. 10.40am: As @simonfrantz points out on twitter, the last female Laureate in physics was Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 . 10.37am: There have been some regrettable Nobel awards in the past. Perhaps the most worrying was the award in 1949 to Dr Egas Moniz of Portugal for discovering the therapeutic value of lobotomy. The New England Journal of Medicine hailed the procedure as the birth of a “new psychiatry”. The prize led to a rise in lobotomies, which were therapeutically worthless. 10.35am: Here is the live stream of the Nobel prize announcement. 10.22am: And so to day two of Nobel prize week and the pundits have been busy with their predictions as to who will be honoured with today’s award for contributions to physics. The Nobel Assembly is due to announce the winner, or winners, some time after 10.45am BST. We will follow events live here. Yesterday, three scientists won the Nobel prize in medicine for groundbreaking work on the immune system. The award was overshadowed with the sad news that one of the recipients, Ralph Steinman at Rockefeller University in New York, passed away a few days ago. The Nobel assembly was unaware of this when the award was announced and has ruled that the prize will stand. The prize earns the winner or winners 10 million Swedish kronor, or £934,000. So who are the hot favourites for today’s prize in physics? According to the news agency Associated Press, physicists working on quantum entanglement – which underpins hopes for superfast quantum computing – are strong contenders for this year’s prize. Those predictions draw on “> names put forward by the citation company, Thomson Reuters , which failed to predict the winners of yesterday’s prize. Last year, the Nobel prize in physics was won by two Russian-born scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester University , for their experiments with graphene, the strongest and thinnest material known. Before becoming a Nobel prizewinner, Geim made headlines for levitating frogs , an achievement that earned him an Ig Nobel prize from the irreverent sister awards . The potential of graphene-based products prompted the UK government to announce a £50m Global Research and Technology Hub to commercialise graphene products. A live stream of the Nobel awards will appear here as soon as the video is available. Nobel prizes Science prizes Physics Particle physics Ian Sample guardian.co.uk