Nobel prize in physics awarded to scientists for research on exoplanets and dark matter

Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for "ground-breaking" discoveries about the Universe.

James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were announced as this year's winners at a ceremony in Stockholm.

Peebles, of Princeton University in the United States, was awarded half of the 9-million-Swedish-crown ($910,000) prize while Mayor and Queloz, from Switzerland’s University of Geneva and Britain’s Cambridge University, shared the rest.

Peebles was honoured for work on the evolution of the Universe, while Mayor and Queloz won for their discovery of a planet around a Sun-like star.

“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, told reporters 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 one-time 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 so-called “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 in a emailed comment.

“We now know that most stars are orbited by retinues of planets; there may be a billion planets in our galaxy resembling the Earth,” Rees added.

Since their discovery, more than 4,000 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 1,000 degrees centigrade, the award-giving academy said.

With numerous ongoing searches for more exoplanets, this science might eventually also “find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there,” it said.