Astronomy has experienced tremendous growth and development during the past fifty years as the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays was opened to investigation. Remarkable progress has been achieved in our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe; the structure and dynamics of galaxies; the birth, life, and death of stars and stellar systems; and the formation and ubiquity of planetary systems. The names of exotic objects such as supernovae, quasars, pulsars, and black holes have entered the public lexicon, and have captured the imagination of people, young and old, all over the world.
A new golden age of astronomy can be expected in the twenty-first century as the research tools of the more traditional disciplines are brought to bear on the great astronomical problems, and as novel windows are opened to the universe, using neutrinos and gravitational radiation to explore extreme configurations of matter and energy not accessible to terrestrial laboratories.
for their pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Their predictions have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe.
Prizes in Astonomy have been awarded to one laureate only
Prizes in Astonomy have been shared by two laureates
Prizes in Astonomy have been shared by three laureates
for his leadership in the Voyager project, which has, over the past four decades, transformed our understanding of the four giant planets and the outer solar system, and has now begun to explore interstellar space.
for his contributions to astronomy in the infrared to submillimetre spectral range. He detected the cosmic far-infrared background from past star-forming galaxies, and proposed aromatic hydrocarbon molecules as a constituent of interstellar matter. With the Planck space mission, he has dramatically advanced our knowledge of cosmology in the presence of interstellar matter foregrounds.
for his contributions to understanding structure formation in the Universe. With powerful numerical simulations he has shown how small density fluctuations in the early Universe develop into galaxies and other nonlinear structures, strongly supporting a cosmology with a flat geometry, and dominated by dark matter and a cosmological constant.
for conceiving and designing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose recent direct detection of gravitational waves opens a new window in astronomy, with the first remarkable discovery being the merger of a pair of stellar mass black holes.
for his conceiving and leading the Kepler Mission, which greatly advanced knowledge of both extrasolar planetary systems and stellar interiors.
for their contributions to the measurements of features in the large-scale structure of galaxies used to constrain the cosmological model including baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions.
