邵逸夫天文学奖
2025

2025年度邵逸夫天文学奖平均颁予约翰・理察・邦德 (John Richard Bond) 和乔治・艾夫斯塔希欧 (George Efstathiou)，以表彰他们在宇宙学方面的开创性工作，尤其是他们对宇宙微波背景辐射涨落的研究。他们的预测已得到大量地面、气球和太空观测仪器的验证，从而精确测定出宇宙的年龄、几何结构和质能含量。约翰・理察・邦德是加拿大理论天体物理研究所教授暨多伦多大学教授。乔治・艾夫斯塔希欧是英国剑桥大学天体物理学教授。

宇宙学在过去二十年间经歷了一场革命，主要得益于对宇宙微波背景辐射 (早期宇宙的遗迹) 温度和偏振场涨落的角功率谱日益精确的测量，尤其是美国国家航空航天局的威尔琴森微波各向异性探测器 (2001–2010) 和欧洲太空总署的普朗克航天器 (2009–2013) 所作的贡献。这些涨落很小 — 背景辐射的强度在所有方向上大致相同，差异不超过0.01%，并且仅有轻微的偏振 — 但足以容许我们一窥宇宙极其年轻时的面貌，对许多基础物理学方面的内容进行检验，揭示暗物质和暗能量的本质，并测量了许多基本宇宙学参数，其精确度是几十年前的宇宙学家无法想像的。

Cosmology has undergone a revolution in the past two decades, driven mainly by increasingly precise measurements of the angular power spectrum of fluctuations in the temperature and polarization fields of the cosmic microwave background, a relic of the early universe, most notably by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe spacecraft (2001–2010) and the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft (2009–2013). These fluctuations are small—the strength of the background radiation is the same in all directions to better than 0.01% and it is only slightly polarized—but they offer a glimpse of the universe when it was very young, a test of many aspects of fundamental physics, insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and measurements of many fundamental cosmological parameters with accuracies unimaginable to cosmologists a few decades ago.

Although many researchers contributed to the development of the theoretical framework that governs the behaviour of the cosmic microwave background, Bond and Efstathiou emphasised the importance of the background as a cosmological probe and took the crucial step of making precise predictions for what can be learned from specific models of the history and the composition of the mass and energy in the universe. Modern numerical codes used to interpret the experimental results are based almost entirely on the physics developed by Bond and Efstathiou. Their work exemplifies one of the rare cases in astrophysics where later experimental studies accurately confirmed unambiguous, powerful theoretical predictions. The interpretation of these experiments through Bond and Efstathiou’s theoretical models shows that the spatial geometry of the observable universe is nearly flat, and yields the age of the universe with a precision of 0.15%, the rate of expansion of the universe with a precision of 0.5%, the fraction of the critical density arising from dark energy to better than 1%, and so on. The measurements also strongly constrain theories of the early universe that might have provided the initial “seed” for all the cosmic structure we see today, and the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that dominate the mass-energy content of the universe.