Profile of James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz
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PROFILE Profile of James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz: 2019 Nobel Laureates in Physics PROFILE Neta A. Bahcalla,1 and Adam Burrowsa Mankind has long been fascinated by the mysteries of our Universe: How old and how big is the Universe? How did the Universe begin and how is it evolving? What is the composition of the Universe and the nature of its dark matter and dark energy? What is our Earth’s place in the cosmos and are there other planets (and life) around other stars? The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics honors three pioneering scientists for their fundamental contributions to these cosmic questions—Professors James Peebles of Princeton University, Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva and the University of Cambridge—“for contributions (Left) Profs. James Peebles (Princeton University), (Center) Michel Mayor (University of Geneva), and (Right) Didier Queloz (University of Geneva and the University of to our understanding of the evolution of the universe Cambridge). Jessica Gow, Frank Perry, Isabel Infantes/AFP/Scanpix Sweden. and Earth’s place in the cosmos,” with one half to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology,” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor The science of cosmology started in earnest mostly and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Alexander orbiting a solar-type star.” Friedman, Willem de Sitter, and Georges Lemaître, using Einstein’s equations, recognized that our Universe The Evolution of the Universe is not static, it must be either expanding or contracting James Peebles was born in Southern Manitoba, Can- and Hubble’s remarkable observational discovery of the ada, in 1935; he moved to Princeton University for expanding Universe in 1929 confirmed this. The ob- graduate school in 1958 and remained in Princeton as served expansion implied that the Universe must have the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics (now emeritus) started from a compact state, but this idea took a long for his entire career. He has long been considered one time to be accepted. In the 1940s, George Gamow, of the fathers of modern cosmology, the science of the Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman investigated the origin and evolution of the Universe. As the Nobel consequences of a hot Big Bang—a Universe that committee states, “James Peebles took the cosmos, started from a small, very dense, and very hot stage— with its billions of galaxies and galaxy clusters. His the- and made predictions that could be tested. They cal- oretical framework, developed over two decades, is the culated that light elements should have been formed foundation of our modern understanding of the Uni- in the hot Big Bang and that a huge amount of radia- verse’s history, from the Big-Bang to the present day.” tion, the remnant of which (the cosmic microwave The spectacular advances in cosmology over the past background, or CMB) should still fill the entire Universe half a century have been driven by a combination of today, must have been generated. both observations and theory. The revelation that our However, when Peebles began working in cos- Universe has begun from a hot and dense Big Bang mology in the 1960s, at the invitation of his Princeton 13.8 billion years ago and has been expanding and mentor and friend, Prof. Robert Dicke, the field was evolving ever since, under the influence of the still vague, not well quantified, and had only modest mysterious dark matter and dark energy that dominate experimental support. In 1965, Peebles, with his the cosmos, in addition to the ∼5% baryons that makes colleagues Dicke, Wilkinson, and Roll, recalculated up the stars, planets, and all of us, is a triumph for both the black-body temperature of the remnant radiation observational and theoretical science. expected from the aforementioned hot Big Bang aDepartment of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 This article is part of a series of articles in PNAS highlighting the discoveries and profiling the award winners of the Nobel Prize. Author contributions: N.A.B. and A.B. wrote the paper. The authors declare no competing interest. Published under the PNAS license. 1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected]. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1920833117 PNAS Latest Articles | 1of3 Downloaded by guest on September 27, 2021 and estimated it to be ∼10 K today, and Dicke and Universe. Moreover, Peebles has also authored sev- collaborators began to look for it. That same year the eral outstanding books in cosmology, used by gen- signal of the CMB was indeed detected by Arno erations of students and scientists at all levels: Physical Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, Cosmology (3), Large Scale Structure of the Universe New Jersey. Penzias and Wilson conferred with (4), Principles of Physical Cosmology (5), Finding the Big Peebles and Dicke to understand the observed sig- Bang (6), and his most recent book just being com- nal, which corresponded to a radiation temperature pleted Cosmology’sCentury(7). of 3.5 K. The discovery of the CMB radiation con- “Just about every advance in our understanding firmed the hot Big Bang model and opened the door of cosmology has been boosted by the work of Jim to a greatly improved understanding of physical Peebles,” says Princeton cosmologist Jeremiah Ostriker. cosmology.* Penzias and Wilson were awarded the “Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the growth of cosmic 1978 Nobel prize for their observational discovery of structure, the existence of dark matter, and so many the CMB. other advances in our understanding were shepherded With the discovery of the CMB, Peebles investi- by Jim Peebles’ work and wisdom.” Thanks to his ef- gated its impact on the formation of nuclei in the first forts, cosmology is now a solid, robust scientific field, few minutes of the hot dense Universe, the so-called Big with both theory and observation going hand-in-hand Bang nucleosynthesis. While Big Bang nucleosynthesis to reveal the amazing and evolving Universe. While had been worked on previously, the influence of the hot some fundamental questions remain open—including CMB has not been considered in detail. Peebles used what is the dark matter and what is the nature of the the measured temperature of the CMB, extrapolated to mysterious dark energy—cosmologists can now explain, the hot temperature during the early Universe, and quantify, and make future predictions for the evolution of calculated the resulting nucleosynthesis. From his cal- the Universe. culations of the hot Big Bang, Peebles determined the “Jim is one of the true giants in the field,” wrote abundance of light elements created in the early Uni- Paul Steinhardt, Peebles’ colleague at Princeton. verse. His estimate for primordial helium of 27 to 30% of “His work transformed our understanding of the hot, all nuclei by mass is similar to the currently observed expanding Universe from qualitative to precise, revealed primordial helium abundance (25%). the existence of dark matter, and pointed out the puz- Peebles continued his exploration of physical cos- zles that remain.” mology in numerous areas. He predicted the tem- perature fluctuations in the spectrum of the CMB, the Earth’s Place in the Cosmos primordial seeds of structure formation in the Uni- Before 1995, a few astronomers were trying to de- verse; it took many years of continuously improved velop spectroscopic techniques with which to mea- experimental techniques to finally detect the CMB sure the Doppler wobble of a parent star due to the fluctuations (first with the cosmic background ex- possible presence of planetary companions. Some plorer mission, and later with CMB measurements by considered this indirect method more viable than di- BOOMERanG [the Ballon observations of millimetric rect imaging, since the dim planet would be difficult extragalactic radiation and geophysics experiment], to detect from under the glare of the parent star. An- the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy map, and the other indirect technique being pursued was astrome- Planck mission). He helped provide theoretical evi- try, whereby the reflex motion of the star due to the dence for dark matter in spiral galaxies by showing gravitational tug of an orbiting planetary companion ’ that they would not be stable at their observed flat- would signal the planet s presence. A Jupiter-mass tened shape without a more stabilizing gravitational planet at the distance that Jupiter is from the Sun, potential of a massive halo to surround them. Peebles but orbiting a nearby solar-mass star, would induce ∼ −1 pioneered the cosmological model of “cold dark mat- a stellar wobble of 12 m s (onlyabitfasterthan ter,” which is the best current model for dark matter, a human can run) in the stellar spectrum and an as- ∼ based on evidence from observations of large-scale trometric displacement of 0.005 astronomical units structure. He was a pioneer in the quantitative study (AU). One AU is the distance between the Earth and of the observed distribution of galaxies, using the the Sun. The latter at a distance from the solar system ∼ powerful statistical tools of the two-point and higher- of 10 parsecs is equivalent to an angular displacement ∼ order correlation functions, and applied these tools of the nearby star of 0.5 milliarcsecs. However, even to large surveys of galaxies. Peebles pioneered models now, almost 25 years since 1995, such astrometric de- for cosmic structure formation and evolution through tection techniques have yet to prove themselves. This left the Doppler technique. However, astrono- the gravitational instability picture in an expanding − mers were routinely achieving only ∼200 m s 1.Some astronomers, using hydrogen fluoride or iodine in- *Penzias and Wilson decided to publish their results simulta- ternal spectral calibrators and good thermal control, −1 neously with Dicke and Peebles; in the first paper, Dicke, Peebles, had achieved ∼20 m s , but had discovered noth- Roll, and Wilkinson (1), showed the importance of the CMB as ing.