This morning the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.” James Peebles, a physicist at Princeton University, won half of the prize for his contributions to physical cosmology, while Michel Mayor, a physicist at the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz, an astronomer at Geneva and at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, shared the other half for the 1995 discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star.