This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to an astrophysicist who came up with sweeping ideas to explain how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies, and to two astronomers who showed that other stars similar to the sun also possess planets.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday that James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, shared the prize — and half the prize money of more than $900,000 — for his theories that have helped explain 13.8 billion years of cosmological history.

The other half honored work by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who were the first to discover a planet circling around a distant sun-like star.

The two areas of research, while vastly different in scope and topic, “really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” Ulf Danielsson, a member of the committee that selected the winners, said during an online broadcast.