以表彰他們在測量星系大尺度結構特徵上的貢獻，這些測量包括重子聲振盪和紅移空間扭曲，其結果足以對宇宙學模型作出約束。
2014年度邵逸夫天文學獎頒予丹尼爾．愛森斯坦 (Daniel Eisenstein)、肖恩．科爾 (Shaun Cole) 及約翰．皮考克 (John A Peacock)，以表彰他們在測量星系大尺度結構特徵上的貢獻，這些測量包括重子聲振盪 (BAO) 和紅移空間扭曲，其結果足以對宇宙學模型作出約束。愛森斯坦為美國哈佛大學天文學教授；科爾為英國杜倫大學物理學教授；皮考克為英國愛丁堡大學宇宙學教授。
早期宇宙的溫度很高，密度也很大。重子物質高度電離，由裸原子核和自由電子組成，稱為等離子體。無論當時還是現在，光子的數目較原子核或電子都多很多。由於光子和電子的散射，使等離子體和光子緊密耦合。這種情況在大爆炸後的初期維持了40萬年，直至溫度降至3000 開氏度，電子和原子核遂結合成中性原子，與光子解耦，中性原子與光子變成互相獨立的系統。
The early universe was hot and dense. Baryonic matter was highly ionized and consisted of bare nuclei and free electrons, a state known as plasma. Then as now, photons were far more numerous than either nuclei or electrons. As a consequence of photon-electron scattering, the plasma and photons were tightly coupled into a single fluid whose pressure opposed gravity. This situation pertained during the first 400,000 years after the big bang. At that point the temperature had dropped to 3000 kelvin, the electrons and nuclei combined into neutral atoms which decoupled from the photons, and baryonic matter fell into gravitational potential wells of the dominant dark matter.
Primordial density perturbations on all scales arose shortly after the big bang and later seeded the formation of structure from galaxies to superclusters. The density perturbations excited baryon acoustic waves, essentially sound waves, that propagated through the primordial plasma at about half the speed of light prior to decoupling. After decoupling, these waves ceased propagating, thereby imprinting a well-defined length scale of about 500 million light years on matter density correlations at the current epoch.
