Space scientists share Nobel
STOCKHOLM/
LONDON: CanadianAmerican cosmologist
James Peebles and Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday for revealing the wonder of the evolution of the universe and discovering planets orbiting distant suns.
Peebles, of Princeton University in the United States, was awarded half of the 9 million Swedish crown ($NZ1.55 million) prize while Mayor and Queloz, from Switzerland’s University of Geneva and Britain’s Cambridge University, shared the rest.
‘‘This year’s Nobel laureates have painted a picture of our universe far stranger and more wonderful than we could ever have imagined,’’ Ulf Danielsson, a professor and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said as the prize was announced.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the scientists’ research had ‘‘transformed our ideas about the cosmos’’.
Mayor and his onetime doctoral student Queloz said it was ‘‘simply extraordinary’’ to be awarded a Nobel for what they described as ‘‘the most exciting discovery of our entire career’’.
The pair announced the first discovery of a planet outside our own solar system, a socalled ‘‘exoplanet‘‘, in 1995.
‘‘The study of exoplanets is perhaps the most vibrant field of astronomy,’’ Martin Rees, a Cambridge University professor and Astronomer Royal, said.
‘‘We now know that most stars are orbited by retinues of planets; there may be a billion planets in our galaxy resembling the Earth.’’ Since their discovery, more than 4000 exoplanets have been found in the Milky Way, many of them nothing like our own world. Indeed, the first planet they found, 51 Pegasi b, orbits a sun 50 light years away that heats its surface to more than 1000degC, the awardgiving academy said.
Physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week; William Kaelin, Gregg Semenza and Peter Ratcliffe shared the medicine prize on Tuesday for discoveries about how cells respond to oxygen levels. — Reuters