We have always been and always will be curious whether there are Earth-like planets somewhere in our Universe and whether there is life as we know it on these other planets as well. We have always been fascinated by the starry sky and have invested lots of time (later, also money) to investigate the frontiers that lie beyond our imagination. With the discovery of the first exoplanet - named 51 Pegasi b, which Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced on a conference in Florence, Italy, on 6th of October, 1995, the astrophysical revolution was born.

The foundations of physical cosmology were set in the 1960s and by the mid of the 1980s, these foundations gloriously transformed into a palace of knowledge for our Universe. Large portion of the relevant theories were developed by James Peebles who, with his creative and bold questioning of the Universe’s structure and history, set the cosmological field on the Physics map and paved the way for a new world of knowledge, freed from the chains of legends and myths. This year, for his life-long dedication and “contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the universe”, James Peebles is awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics.