Peebles, Phillip James Edwin, 1935–, Canadian-American astrophysicist and cosmologist, b. Winnipeg, Man., Ph.D. Princeton, 1962. He spent his entire career as a researcher at Princeton, becoming a full professor in 1972 (emeritus from 2000). Peebles received half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology; Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the other half for their discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Peebles established a mathematical foundation for the field of cosmology, and his theories have helped elucidate almost 14 million years of cosmological history, explaining how complex structures like galaxies developed and helping to establish that dark matter and dark energy are the primary components of the universe.
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