天文學獎
2005

哥白尼革命萌發了恆星都是別的太陽，而可能有行星繞它們運轉的想法。馬西與麥耶1995年的發現證實了此想法。驚奇的是：那年發現的首例繞類日恆星的巨行星離中央星極近，只有木星軌道半徑的百分之一；後來的工作又顯示出其他驚奇現象：行星出現的或然率賴於恆星重元素(如鐵)含量；多行星系統的軌道週期彼此間有整倍數關係；行星軌道偏心度(eccentricity)極大；行星質量大小不同，但都不重於十個木星。為這些開創性與挑戰性的成就馬西和麥耶榮獲2005年邵逸夫天文學獎。

The Copernican Revolution spawned the notions that the stars might be suns in their own right and that planetary worlds might orbit such suns. The idea that stars are suns gained plausibility through the investigations by Wollaston and Fraunhofer who showed that the Sun and many stars exhibit similar spectral signatures. It became established scientific fact in 1838 when Bessel, Struve, and Henderson determined, respectively, the distances to 61 Cygni, Vega, and Alpha Centauri, and calculated that they have absolute brightness similar to the Sun. The idea that planets orbit other normal stars remained in the realm of philosophical speculation until 1995, when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found, and Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler confirmed, the existence of the first planet around a sunlike star, 51 Pegasi. Since that exciting result a decade ago, Marcy and Mayor have led the two most productive and successful research groups searching for extrasolar planets.

Both groups detect extrasolar planets by finding small periodic variations in the radial velocity of the host star. Along with a number of other groups, they worked in relative obscurity for many years, in large part because most astronomers believed that these radial-velocity oscillations would be too small to detect in plausible planetary systems. This belief was based on the analogy with our own solar system, resulting in the theoretical prejudice that massive planets could not form close to their host star, where they would generate the largest reflex motion in the central body.