天文学奖
2005

哥白尼革命萌发了恒星都是别的太阳，而可能有行星绕它们运转的想法。马西与麦耶1995年的发现证实了此想法。惊奇的是：那年发现的首例绕类日恒星的巨行星离中央星极近，只有木星轨道半径的百分之一；后来的工作又显示出其他惊奇现象：行星出现的或然率赖於恒星重元素(如铁)含量；多行星系统的轨道周期彼此间有整倍数关系；行星轨道偏心度(eccentricity)极大；行星质量大小不同，但都不重於十个木星。为这些开创性与挑战性的成就马西和麦耶荣获2005年邵逸夫天文学奖。

The Copernican Revolution spawned the notions that the stars might be suns in their own right and that planetary worlds might orbit such suns. The idea that stars are suns gained plausibility through the investigations by Wollaston and Fraunhofer who showed that the Sun and many stars exhibit similar spectral signatures. It became established scientific fact in 1838 when Bessel, Struve, and Henderson determined, respectively, the distances to 61 Cygni, Vega, and Alpha Centauri, and calculated that they have absolute brightness similar to the Sun. The idea that planets orbit other normal stars remained in the realm of philosophical speculation until 1995, when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found, and Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler confirmed, the existence of the first planet around a sunlike star, 51 Pegasi. Since that exciting result a decade ago, Marcy and Mayor have led the two most productive and successful research groups searching for extrasolar planets.

Both groups detect extrasolar planets by finding small periodic variations in the radial velocity of the host star. Along with a number of other groups, they worked in relative obscurity for many years, in large part because most astronomers believed that these radial-velocity oscillations would be too small to detect in plausible planetary systems. This belief was based on the analogy with our own solar system, resulting in the theoretical prejudice that massive planets could not form close to their host star, where they would generate the largest reflex motion in the central body.