There is no Nobel prize for astrophysics, but the following physics Nobels are arguably astrophysical. (Boldface year prizes used radio telescopes!)
| Year | Laureate | Scientific Achievement |
|---|---|---|
| 1936 | Victor Franz Hess | discovery of cosmic rays (shared with Carl David Anderson for discovery of the positron) |
| 1967 | Hans Albrecht Bethe | contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially discoveries concerning the energy production in stars |
| 1974 | Martin Ryle | observations and inventions, including aperture synthesis |
| Antony Hewish | aperture synthesis techniques leading to the discovery of pulsars (Jocelyn Bell Burnell neglected) | |
| 1978 | Arno Allan Penzias | discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation (shared with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa in low-temperature physics) |
| Robert Woodrow Wilson | ||
| 1983 | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | physics of stellar evolution |
| William Alfred Fowler | nuclear reactions and stellar nucleosynthesis | |
| 1993 | Russell Alan Hulse | discovery of binary pulsar allowing tests confirming gravitational radiation |
| Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. | ||
| 2002 | Raymond Davis Jr. | first detection of solar neutrinos |
| Masatoshi Koshiba | later cosmic neutrino detectors (Kamiokande) | |
| Riccardo Giacconi | contributions leading to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources | |
| 2006 | John Cromwell Mather | confirmation of the blackbody nature and discovery of the anisotropy of cosmic microwave background radiation |
| George Fitzgerald Smoot III | ||
| 2011 | Saul Perlmutter | discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through the observations of different supernovae |
| Brian P. Schmidt | ||
| Adam G. Riess | ||
| 2015 | Takaaki Kajita | discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass |
| Arthur B. McDonald | ||
| 2017 | Rainer Weiss | contributions to the LIGO detector and the [direct] observation of gravitational waves |
| Kip Thorne | ||
| Barry Barish | ||
| 2019 | James Peebles | theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology |
| Michel Mayor | discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a Solar-type star | |
| Didier Queloz | ||
| 2020 | Roger Penrose | for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity |
| Reinhard Genzel | for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy | |
| Andrea Ghez |
For a full list of physics Nobel winners, see Wikipedia.