The prize is worth 9 million Swedish kroner. The Nobel foundation credits this year's prize-winners with laying the foundations for modern information technology and communications systems. These results may improve our understanding of the formation of atomic-scale structures on surfaces. The observations have been made by a team headed by Andrea Ghez at the University of California at Los Angeles using the using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The experiments could shed light on why our universe appears to contain only matter, even though it is thought that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang.
Neutrino debate heats up.
There is a long-standing problem that the number of neutrinos detected on Earth is much smaller than what the theoretical models of the Sun predict. Neutrinos were thought to be massless particles, travelling at the speed of light, that are emitted in the nuclear reactions occurring in the Sun. How and where in their journey these oscillations actually occur is however still a mystery. SNO has just begun to take data.