Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for studies of Earth’s place in the universe

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists who transformed our view of the cosmos.

>> Megan SpeciaThe New York Times
Published : 8 Oct 2019, 03:56 PM
Updated : 8 Oct 2019, 04:07 PM

James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, shared half of the prize for theories that explained how the universe swirled into galaxies and everything we see in the night sky, and indeed much that we cannot see.

The other half was shared by two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who were the first to discover an exoplanet, or a planet circling a sun-like star.

“They really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” said Ulf Danielsson, a member of the Nobel committee.

Peebles is the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton. Mayor is an astrophysicist and professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Geneva. He formally retired in 2007, according to the Planetary Society, but remains active as a researcher at the Geneva Observatory. Queloz is a professor of physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and at the University of Geneva, where he works “at the origin of the exoplanet revolution in astrophysics.”

Peebles’s work on physical cosmology “enriched the entire field of research,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, and laid a foundation for the transformation of the science of cosmology over the past 50 years, “from speculation to science.”

The framework became the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe.

The discovery of the first planet outside of our solar system, announced by Mayor and Queloz in 1995, revolutionised astronomy. More than 4,000 exoplanets have since been discovered in our Milky Way galaxy, including some that may be habitable. More and more are being spotted with space telescopes like TESS, launched by NASA last year.

The astronomers’ discovery, at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, immediately showed that many planetary systems are nothing like the solar system. The planet they discovered is as large as Jupiter, but virtually hugs the star — much closer than Mercury is to the sun. It completes one orbit in just four days.

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