Nobel Physics 2019 honors discoveries about cosmology and exoplanets

The awards went to three scientists, James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, with two studies on cosmology and exoplanets.

The Swedish Academy of Sciences at 16:55, October 8 (Hanoi time) announced the 2019 Physics Prize for scientists James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. The three scientists will share a reward of more than $ 900,000 for two research projects that are considered to "contribute to the understanding of the evolution of the universe and the position of the Earth in the universe". .

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019. (Image: Twitter)

Researcher James Peebles built the theoretical foundation of cosmology and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered exoplanets orbiting stars like the Sun.

James Peebles of Princeton University (USA) specializes in the universe with billions of galaxies and clusters. His work has increased the understanding of the structure and history of the universe, laying the foundations for cosmology for the past 50 years. The Big Bang model describes the process of the universe evolving for nearly 14 billion years from a hot and dense sphere into a vast, cold and ever expanding universe.

Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the dark universe gradually becomes transparent, allowing light to travel through space. Today, the radiation is left in the form of the cosmic microwave background and stores a lot of information about the early universe.

With theoretical and computational tools, Peebles decipher traces left from the early universe and discovered many new processes. He realized that we only knew 5% of the visible universe in the form of stars, planets, and humans. The remaining 95% consists of dark energy and dark matter, as physicists call it. Dark energy is the force that promotes the expansion of the universe while invisible dark matter seems to float around galaxies, which can only be known through gravity attraction.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) explore the solar system's neighborhoods in the Milky Way. In October 1995, they found the giant gas planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi 50 light-years from Earth. Using specialized equipment, they observed Jupiter-like planet 51 Pegasi b from the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France. This is the first exoplanet discovered around a main sequence star, which unites hydrogen atoms to form helium atoms at the core. Main sequence stars, including the Sun, are the most common type of stars in the universe.

Their discovery opened the revolution in astronomy. Since then, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way, with varying sizes, morphologies, and orbits.

Since Alfred Nobel founded the prize, 112 Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded to 209 scientists. John Bardeen was the only scholar to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and 1972. The award was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to researchers Arthur Ashkin (USA), Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland (Canada) for their breakthrough inventions in laser physics. Strickland at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics since Maria Goeppert Mayer received this honor in 1963. She is the third woman in history to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

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