2019 Nobel Prizes: What you can learn from this year winners – Big Think, Bigthink.com

Nobel Prize: Physics

How did the Big Bang produce the swirling galaxies that populate our universe, and how can scientists detect and study planets that orbit stars lightyears away from Earth? The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three scientists who helped shed light on these complex questions.

James Peebles, the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton, received half of the award, which includes half of the $ 918, 000 prize money. Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist and professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz, a professor of physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and at the University of Geneva, together share the other half of the prize.

“While James Peebles’ theoretical discoveries contributed to our understanding of how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz explored our cosmic neighborhoods on the hunt for unknown planets. Their discoveries have forever changed our conceptions of the world, “the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Goran Hansson, said.

How Dr. Peebles enriched cosmology

Since the 1960 s, Dr. Peebles’ work has helped to solidify and enrich cosmology, chiefly by finding ways to learn about the universe from the ancient radiation leftover from the Big Bang.

Some 400, 000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for light rays to travel through space. Today, billions of years later, this ancient radiation is still around us, though its temperature is near absolute zero. But Dr. Peebles discovered that the temperature of this background radiationprovides clues about how much matter was created by the Big Bang.

The calculations made possible by this discovery also shed light on the matter and processes in the universe that we can’t see: dark energy and dark matter.

“The results showed us a universe in which just five per cent of its content is known, the matter which constitutes stars, planets, trees – and us, “the academywrote. “The rest, 95 per cent, is unknown dark matter and dark energy. This is a mystery and a challenge to modern physics. “

Mayor and Queloz: Finding exoplanets

Astronomers detect exoplanets by measuringextremely subtle changes in a star’s activity. These changes occur as exoplanets orbit their host star, and the predictability of the changes allows scientists to learn quite a lot about the properties of exoplanets. In 1995, Mayor and Queloz used this approach to discover the first planet outside of our solar system . It might sound surprising to us today, but before their discovery astronomers considered that maybe it was extremely rare for stars to have planets orbiting them, meaning life outside of Earth would be even more unlikely, if not impossible.

“This discovery started a revolution in astronomy and over 4, 000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way, “the academywrote. “Strange new worlds are still being discovered, with an incredible wealth of sizes, forms and orbits. They challenge our preconceived ideas about planetary systems and are forcing scientists to revise their theories of the physical processes behind the origins of planets. to start searching for exoplanets, we may eventually find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there. “