The Nobel Prize for Physics Awarded To Three Astronomers -

Three astronomers James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz won Nobel Prize for Physics 2019.

The prize is awarded for their research that helped us understand our place in the Universe.
James Pebbles, the Canadian-American cosmologist won the prize for his theoretical work that helped us understand the aftermath of Big Bang.
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won the prize for their discovery of an exoplanet that changed the notion of how planets were perceived.

Peebles used theoretical physics and calculations to interpret the aftermath of the big bang.
He focused largely on Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation which is electromagnetic radiation that is now substantially cooled after the big bang.
In 1964, radio astronomers Penzias and Robert Wilson detected CMB through detectors which led to their Nobel in 1978.
But, they later found that Peebles had already theorized about CMB.
It is the work of Peebles that made us understand how matter is created and later led to galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Through his work we now know that Universe is 5% matter, 26% dark matter and 69% is dark energy.

While space telescopes like Kepler and Hubble are finding exoplanets frequently now, the first exoplanet was discovered only inn1992.
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz made their discovery in 1995.
They discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star 50 light years away called 51 Pegasus.
The planet is named 51 Pegasus b.
Using a spectrograph, ELODIE, Mayor and his team observed the “Doppler effect” of the planet.
Doppler effect is when the star wobbles as an effect of a planet’s gravity on it observed light.
The planet was a hot gas giant. Until then gas giants were presumed to be cold worlds and formed far away from the star.
The discovery started a revolution in astronomy and more and more planets are being discovered now.