Department of Physics
McGill University

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for work in two different areas of astrophysics that transformed the way we view the evolution of the Universe and our place in it.

First, we will discuss Jim Peebles' ground-breaking contributions to physical cosmology, in particular to the development of Standard Big Bang Cosmology, the theory of CMB anisotropies and the prediction of Dark Energy.

We will then turn to the second half of the Nobel Prize, awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of a gas giant planet orbiting a solar-type star, giving birth to the now booming field of exoplanets. We will describe the radial velocity technique used by Mayor and Queloz, and in particular the role of Canadians, both in pioneering this method of searching for planets and in next generation instrumentation.