It couldn't have been planned better. Just as the Nobel committee was announcing its physics award would go to the research that identified the "accelerating expansion of the Universe", delegates to the European Space Agency were sitting down in Paris to approve a mission to investigate "dark energy" - the very thing thought to be pushing the cosmos apart at a faster and faster rate.
Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will share the Nobel. The trio studied a particular type of stellar explosion, or supernova, and found that the most distant of these objects were receding quickest.
This observation led to the theory that some mysterious, gravitationally repulsive dark energy must be behind the rising expansion of the cosmos - although we don't really have the foggiest idea what that is.
Esa's Euclid telescope will endeavour to get some answers. It will launch in 2019 and map the spread of galaxies and clusters of galaxies over 10 billion years of cosmic history.
Euclid will look in detail at the way those structures have grown through time to get some sense of how dark energy is working.
What's interesting from the perspective of this column is that it is Europe and not America that is launching this space mission.
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