为表彰最早发现太阳系以外的一个恒星的行星,了解其质量与轨道,从而引导出对行星之产生的革命性的新认识。
哥白尼革命萌发了恒星都是别的太阳,而可能有行星绕它们运转的想法。马西与麦耶1995年的发现证实了此想法。惊奇的是:那年发现的首例绕类日恒星的巨行星离中央星极近,只有木星轨道半径的百分之一;后来的工作又显示出其他惊奇现象:行星出现的或然率赖於恒星重元素(如铁)含量;多行星系统的轨道周期彼此间有整倍数关系;行星轨道偏心度(eccentricity)极大;行星质量大小不同,但都不重於十个木星。为这些开创性与挑战性的成就马西和麦耶荣获2005年邵逸夫天文学奖。
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.
米歇尔・麦耶 (Michel Mayor) (1942年出生),现为瑞士日内瓦大学天文学教授, 并自1998年起出任日内瓦天文台台长。麦耶教授早年在洛桑大学修读物理学(1966年),1971年在日内瓦大学取得哲学博士,自此一直在该校从事研究至1984年,1988年出任天文学教授。麦耶教授参与多个国际科学组织工作,包括南欧洲天文台(智利); 普罗旺斯高地天文台(法国CNRS)。麦耶教授多次逗留英国剑桥天文台(1971年间)和夏威夷大学(1994-95年)工作;他又担任国际天文学联盟有关银河结构局主席(1988-91年);南欧洲天文台科学及技术局委员会主席(1990-92年);和瑞士天体物理学及天文学协会会长(1990-93年)。