邵逸夫天文學獎
2025

2025年度邵逸夫天文學獎平均頒予約翰・理察・邦德 (John Richard Bond) 和喬治・艾夫斯塔希歐 (George Efstathiou)，以表彰他們在宇宙學方面的開創性工作，尤其是他們對宇宙微波背景輻射漲落的研究。他們的預測已得到大量地面、氣球和太空觀測儀器的驗證，從而精確測定出宇宙的年齡、幾何結構和質能含量。約翰・理察・邦德是加拿大理論天體物理研究所教授暨多倫多大學教授。喬治・艾夫斯塔希歐是英國劍橋大學天體物理學教授。

宇宙學在過去二十年間經歷了一場革命，主要得益於對宇宙微波背景輻射 (早期宇宙的遺跡) 溫度和偏振場漲落的角功率譜日益精確的測量，尤其是美國國家航空航天局的威爾琴森微波各向異性探測器 (2001–2010) 和歐洲太空總署的普朗克航天器 (2009–2013) 所作的貢獻。這些漲落很小 — 背景輻射的強度在所有方向上大致相同，差異不超過0.01%，並且僅有輕微的偏振 — 但足以容許我們一窺宇宙極其年輕時的面貌，對許多基礎物理學方面的內容進行檢驗，揭示暗物質和暗能量的本質，並測量了許多基本宇宙學參數，其精確度是幾十年前的宇宙學家無法想像的。

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.