Shaw Prize astronomers listen in on the symphony of stars

It could be a piece of art - an intricate golden web that unfolds across a black canvas. When you discover that each of those pinpricks of light marks a galaxy, it is truly mind-blowing.

This stellar survey is the result of almost two decades of work by the University of Edinburgh's Professor John Peacock and Shaun Cole, a professor of physics at Durham University. Together with Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, they are the winners of this year's Shaw Prize for astronomy, which was awarded on Wednesday.

The Hong Kong organisers of the Shaw Prize - established in 2002 and named after late philanthropist Sir Run Run Shaw - said the scientists earned the award "for their contribution to the measurements of features in the large-scale structures of galaxies".

First, a little background: The distribution of galaxies is not completely random. The theory goes that soon after the big bang, when hot plasma filled the universe, sound waves travelled through that plasma at 60 per cent of light speed. About 400,000 years after the big bang, as the universe expanded and cooled and atoms were formed, the sound waves stopped travelling.

"The early-universe sound waves created a characteristic length-scale in the clustering of galaxies - so galaxies are slightly more likely to be separated by 500 million light years, compared to 400 or 600 million light years," Eisenstein said.

"This well-developed theory on where the structure came from - that quantum fluctuations were stretched within the early universe to become a macroscopic scale - gives us a model to test," Cole said.