Alexei Vladimir Filippenko

Wikipedia

I told you yesterday about Alex. I met him as an undergraduate student at the University of California, at the Santa Barbara campus; now he is the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences, at the Berkeley campus. His postdoctoral student, Adam Riess received the Physics Nobel Prize for 2011. Now we know, based on their work, that the Universe is not only expanding, as Edwin Hubble, who studied at Wheaton Warrenville South High School, discovered in the beginning of last century, but is actually accelerating.

You can read below on their discovery of the farthest supernova ever recorded, this allows us to measure the distance of far away stars, for which the parallax method we studied yesterday,cannot be used any more.