Analysis for Science Librarians of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics: From Cosmic Scales to Nearby Stars

ABSTRACT

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to P. James E. Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz for discoveries that have changed our perspective on the world we live in. Peebles’ research questions span across cosmology, from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to studies of anisotropy and galaxy clustering to dark energy and quintessence. Mayor and Queloz discovered the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star – a hot, Jupiter-like planet that completes a single orbit in a manner of days. This paper describes the science behind the prize in the context of these scientists’ careers. A citation analysis of each laureate is presented, drawing on Web of Science and Scopus data, with network graphs.

KEYWORDS:

• Exoplanets
• cosmology
• citation analysis
• Nobel Prize in Physics
• Didier Queloz
• Michel Mayor
• P. James E. Peebles

Notes

1. Recently, Peebles admitted that he dislikes the term big bang because it is misleading. The idea of a big bang seems to say that there was an event and a position, but the Big Bang happened everywhere, and it wasn’t exactly an event (Couronne and Ahmed 2019).