The 10th anniversary of the Gruber International Prize Program, which began with the Cosmology Prize in 2000, will be celebrated in July — this year the Cosmology Prize will be awarded to Freedman, Kennicutt and Mould for their outstanding work on resolving the value of the Hubble constant, the key determinant for how fast the Universe is expanding.

The recipients of the 2009 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation are Wendy Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California, USA; Robert Kennicutt, director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England; and Jeremy Mould, professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Physics, Australia (shown top to bottom in the attendant photos). These three renowned astronomers are being honoured for their leadership in the definitive measurement of the value of the Hubble constant, one of the most important numbers in astronomy. The Hubble constant indicates the rate at which the Universe has been expanding since the "Big Bang", thus connecting the Universe's age with its size. The Cosmology Prize was the first to be awarded when the Gruber international Prize Program was inaugurated in 2000, and its tenth anniversary, which the Foundation will celebrate this summer, coincides with the International Year of Astronomy.

Freedman, Kennicutt and Mould will receive the Prize on August 4th, 2009, at the opening ceremony of the International Astronomical Union's General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The prize consists of a gold medal and $500,000. At the same time, Dr. M.B.N. Kouwenhoven, a young researcher at the University of Sheffield, U.K., will be recognized as the 2009 recipient of a $50,000 grant through the PPGF Fellowship Programme, an annual fellowship sponsored by the IAU and the Gruber Foundation.