Photo: VCG

Canadian-American cosmologist James Peebles and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for research increasing our understanding of our place in the universe, the jury said.

Peebles won one-half of the prize "for theoretical discoveries that have contributed to our understanding of how the universe evolved after the Big Bang," professor Goran Hansson, secretary-general of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told a press conference.

Mayor and Queloz shared the other half for the first discovery, in October 1995, of a planet outside our solar system - an exoplanet - orbiting a solar-type star in the Milky Way.

"Their discoveries have forever changed our conceptions of the world," the jury said. 

Peebles is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University in the US, while Mayor and Queloz are both professors at the University of Geneva. Queloz also works at the University of Cambridge in Britain. 

The Swiss pair hailed their win as "simply extraordinary."

The prize consists of a gold medal, a diploma and the sum of 9 million Swedish kronor ($914,000).

The trio will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

In 2018, the honor went to Arthur Ashkin of the US, Gerard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of the US for laser inventions used for advanced precision instruments in corrective eye surgery and in industry.