This week, the Nobel Committee is announcing the winners of the coveted Nobel Prize, and title of Nobel Laureate in a number of fields.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and some believe that Greta Thunberg has a decent chance of taking it home.

In the meantime, a cosmologist, James Peebles, and two scientists, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, have landed the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics for their contribution to how we understand the universe.

The Washington Post unpacks their achievements:

By studying the earliest moments after the birth of the universe, James Peebles of Princeton University developed a theoretical framework for the evolution of the cosmos that led to the understanding of dark energy and dark matter — substances that can’t be observed by any scientific instruments but nonetheless make up 95 percent of the universe.

Fellow laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva revolutionized astronomy, the Nobel Committee said, when in 1995 they announced the discovery of a large, gaseous world circling a star 50 light-years from our sun — the first extrasolar planet found around a sun-like star. In the decades since, scientists have detected thousands more of these exoplanets, and astronomers now think our universe contains more planets than stars.

For almost a century, scientists concurred that the universe was created when a big bang resulted from a hot, dense particle soup that expanded into the current collection of stars and planets that we know as ‘space’. Then, 50 years ago, scientists discovered a faint form of radiation that suffuses the entire sky allowing them to study the big bang in far more detail.

Peebles (below) studied the temperature of the cosmic microwave background to understand the matter that was created in the big bang.

“This year’s Nobel laureates in physics have painted a picture of a universe far stranger and more wonderful than we ever could have imagined,” Ulf Danielsson, a Nobel Committee member, said at a news conference Tuesday.

“Our view of our place in the universe will never be the same again.”

…“It was, conceptually, a door-opening event,” said observational cosmologist Sandra Faber, a staff member at University of California Observatories.

“It showed that known laws of physics could explain the universe when it was only 100 seconds old. Isn’t that amazing?”

It is amazing, especially because Peeble’s theories led to the discovery of dark energy – the material that holds universes together.

Which brings us to exoplanets.

The first exoplanet observed by Mayor and Queloz wasn’t visible through any telescopes. Instead, the astronomers intuited the world’s existence by observing the way it affected its star.

Their research relied on the fact that planets don’t orbit stars; instead, both planets and stars orbit their common center of mass. If a planet is sufficiently large, compared with its sun, it will cause the star to wobble just a bit. This wobble produces tiny shifts in the light the star emits, and scientists can analyze these shifts to determine the size and distance of the planet.

Their discovery opened up a whole new way of perceiving planets and the solar system.

“New science is very rarely done by just one person … and there were a lot people who made important contributions before and since then,” said Johanna Teske, an exoplanet astronomer at Carnegie Observatories. But Mayor and Queloz’s discovery “was really a turning point for the field.”

“When [Mayor and Queloz] were studying and looking for these exoplanets, people would laugh at them … and call it science fiction,” Teske said. “To see it come from there all the way to now, where they’re winning Nobel Prizes and we’re getting ever closer to finding and characterizing Earthlike planets, it’s great and exciting and a little surreal.”

A big congrats to the winners.

You can read about their discoveries in more detail, here.

[source:washingtonpost]