Exoplanet and cosmology pioneers receive Physics Nobel Prize

Cosmologist James Peebles and astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries on the universe's evolution with the Earth's place on it.

Mayor, at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and his former student Queloz announced in 1995 the first revelation of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star. It launched a field that became one of astronomy's hottest.

Pebbles and his co-researchers built a framework that allowed them to understand the history of the Universe—from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), Big Bang, and cosmos evolution.

In this model, the strange substance known as the dark matter has a focal influence in gathering massive-scale structures of the Universe, for example, cosmic systems and bunches of worlds.

Mayor and Queloz, who are both Swiss and were conceived in 1942 and 1966 respectively, share one part of the prize, worth 9 million Swedish kronor (US$910,000). Peebles, who is a Canadian, born in 1935, will get the other half.

Surprise world

Guillem Anglada-Escudé, a stargazer at the Institute for Space Sciences-CSIC in Barcelona, Spain, said in a news report that Mayor and Queloz's revelation initiated "modern exoplanet science."

Scientists had found exoplanets known as pulsars—which are described as orbiting spinning cores of dead stars. However, these are not similar stars like our own.

The pair's discovery surprised the astronomy community. The planet that researchers discovered, called 51 Pegasi b, is classified as a gas giant. It was a type that space experts had expected would orbit the outer reaches of a solar system.

However, it was found orbiting ten times nearer to the star compared to Mercury's distance to the Sun. It is an early sign that the other planetoid systems "might not be like our own."

Mayor and Queloz, according to exoplanet astronomer Francisco Pepe, were the first to detect such discovery since they picked a more extensive network to do their research.

"When they started their program at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence - by which they found 51 Pegasi b - they didn't focus on trying to discover planets like those in our Solar System," says Pepe who serves as University of Geneva's head of astronomy department. In particular, their observations made a difference since it allowed them to detect Jupiter-sized planets with very tight orbits.

Anglada-Escudé said the finding was exceptional for being "completely unambiguous." He said the Swiss team almost immediately began to survey the sky, which started a "cold war" in hunting exoplanets with another group from the University of California-Berkeley.

They likewise used a similar technique to detect planets, which made them first to confirm the findings. Geoffrey Marcy, the Berkeley team's leader, was previously awarded as a Nobel contender. However, he stepped down from his position in the institution in 2015 due to a violation of sexual-harassment policies.

Understanding the first light

Peebles' discovery helped cosmologists to see significantly more about the universe's beginnings and the CMB.

Mats Larsson, the chair of the 2019 Nobel physics committee, said the radiation's incredible high-precision computations over the last two decades would have told the community almost nothing were it not for Peebles' discovery.

François Bouchet, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, said Peebles left an imprint on almost all branches of cosmology. The discovery, according to him, set the field on a valid proof with calculations rooted in physics.

Bouchet added it is surprising for exosolar planets and cosmology to be combined in a similar prize. However, the two professions gave a new point of view on where human beings are in the universe.