Trio win Nobel physics prize for work to understand cosmos

Three scientists whose discoveries about the evolution of the universe have been described as “ground-breaking” have been awarded the 2019 Nobel prize for physics.

James Peebles, Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor were revealed as this year's winners at a ceremony in Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it was recognising their “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos”. The scientists will share a 9-million kronor (£745,000) cash award.

The Swedish academy said it was awarding half the prize to Peebles, a Canadian-born Princeton professor, whose theoretical cosmological framework “is the foundation of our modern understanding of the universe’s history, from the Big Bang to the present day”.

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Sky News says Peebles has been “hailed as one of the most influential cosmologists of his time”. His analysis of radiation that filled the cosmos just 400,000 years after the Big Bang uncovered major clues as to what the universe looked like at this primitive stage, and how it has evolved.

Meanwhile, the academy said that Swiss duo Mayor and Queloz were being honoured for their discovery of an exoplanet in 1995, then the first planet found outside our solar system. The discovery of 51 Pegasi b - a gaseous ball about 150 times bigger than Earth, with a surface temperature of 1000C - sparked “a revolution in astronomy, and more than 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way”.

Further Nobel prizes will be handed out this week. Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been tipped to win the famous Nobel Peace Prize, after her “school strike for climate” captured the imagination of the planet.

Among the favourites for the Nobel Prize in Literature are Canadian poet Anne Carson, novelists Maryse Conde of Guadeloupe and Can Xue of China and Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale.

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