以表彰他们对磁性旋转不稳定性的发现和硏究。他们的工作说明了磁性旋转不稳定性引发湍流，并足以解释天体物理学里吸积盘的角动量输运机制。
2013年度邵逸夫天文学奖颁予史蒂芬．拜尔巴斯 (Steven A Balbus) 及约翰．霍利 (John F Hawley)，以表彰他们对磁性旋转不稳定性的发现和硏究。他们的工作说明了磁性旋转不稳定性引发湍流，并足以解释天体物理学里吸积盘的角动量输运机制。拜尔巴斯为英国牛津大学 Savilian 天文学讲座教授；霍利为美国维吉尼亚大学理学院副院长、VITA 讲座教授兼天文学系主任。
吸积盘为天体物理学常见现象，在星体形成、双星体系的质量转移、及星云中心的超大质量黑洞的成长等过程，均有重要影响。由吸积盘提供能量的天文学光源，以同等质量比较，其亮度可以超越一般倚赖核聚变获取能量的星体。
The attractive force of gravity is responsible for the formation of bound structures over a wide range of scales, from planets to clusters of galaxies. Unbalanced, gravity would cause matter to collapse into black holes. Fortunately, the concentration of mass by gravity is impeded, at least temporarily, by the requirement that the contracting material rid itself of excess energy and angular momentum. Bulk kinetic energy can be converted into heat and radiated away but angular momentum is less readily disposed of. Consequently, contracting material often assumes the form of a differentially rotating disk. Familiar examples include Saturn’s rings and spiral galaxies. Nascent stars grow by accreting mass from disks that live several million years. The coplanar orbits of the solar system planets and multi-planet systems around other stars are vestiges of these disks.
More exotic accretion disks are found around compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. These systems shine by radiating gravitational potential energy released as mass spirals inward. For fluid to spiral in, its angular momentum must be transported out, but how this happens was for long a mystery. For decades, it was speculated that accretion disks were unstable and that the accretion torque arises from turbulent stresses. However, analytic analyses and numerical simulations consistently failed to identify any appropriate instability. In 1991 Balbus & Hawley announced an elegant solution to this longstanding problem. They demonstrated that even a weak seed magnetic field is sufficient to unleash a powerful instability, the magnetorotational instability (MRI), that both creates and sustains turbulence while also amplifying the magnetic field.
