![]() But you also know there are so many great discoveries elsewhere that are deserving of a Nobel Prize. “To tell the truth, people have been mentioning the Nobel Prize to me since early on and in a strange way you get used to hearing this. “There are so many questions you can start to ask that will have an impact on us – questions about life, about why are we are like we are – and they become something we can tackle, starting with the nature and atmosphere of these planets.” Few scientists have the chance to make a major discovery – did he think he might one day be awarded a Nobel Prize? “Finding the exoplanet offered a new window in astrophysics,” he says. More than 5,000 exoplanets have since been added to the list, including 300 discovered by Queloz himself, and space missions are being planned to discover more about the massive super-Earths, super-Jupiters, gas giants, rocky giants and mini-Neptunes. But, he says, it took a few years of hard work convincing the world that his discovery wasn’t a data glitch but instead a gas-giant planet the size of Jupiter orbiting its star 51-Pegasi every four days. ![]() The discovery changed the way we understand the universe and our place within it. I think there were about 50 of us and we were seen as weirdos,” says Didier, who moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 2013. “Back then, exoplanet research was a very small field. It was as if something big was getting in the way. Twenty-five years previously he'd been a PhD student with Mayor at the University of Geneva when he spotted that a light emitted from a star 50 light years from Earth was wobbling. The Prize celebrated his work leading to the first confirmation of an exoplanet – a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun. On 8 October 2019, Professor Didier Queloz won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos with Professor James Peebles (Princeton University) and Professor Michel Mayor (University of Geneva). ![]()
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