It is Nobel prize week and four physicists have received a telephone call from Stockholm.

In this installment of the Physics World Weekly podcast we chat about James Peebles, who shared one half of the physics prize for playing a crucial role in the development of the Standard Model of cosmology. The other half of that prize was shared equally by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the first observation of an exoplanet in 1995. We explain how that measurement was made and marvel at the fact that thousands more exoplanets have been discovered since.

The fourth physicist to bag a Nobel prize is John Goodenough, who shared the chemistry award with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for the development of lithium-ion batteries. We talk about the significance of this prize and ask why it took so long to award it – Goodenough is a spritely 97.