Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Switzerland
Published: Sunday, Oct 6th 2024, 09:40
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Five years ago, Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor won the Nobel Prize in Physics. They discovered the first planet outside our solar system.
"This discovery is the most exciting of our entire career, and to receive a Nobel Prize is simply extraordinary," the researchers were quoted as saying in a communiqué from the University of Geneva (Unige) at the time. Mayor was at an airport in Spain when he learned of his prize.
On October 6, 1995, Queloz and Mayor announced the discovery of the first so-called exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system. Named 51 Pegasi b, this very first exoplanet was a sensation in the astrophysical community. At the time, Mayor was a professor at the Observatory of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Zurich and Queloz was his doctoral student.
Since then 5600 more exoplanets discovered
"Nobody knew whether exoplanets existed or not," said Mayor. The technologies that made such a discovery possible had only just been developed. The Elodie spectrograph (aka Super-Coravel) was put into operation in 1993 on a telescope with a diameter of two meters in Haute-Provence (F). Thanks to the accuracy of the measurements made by this device, in 1994 the two researchers identified an object that orbited its star in 4.2 days. A year later, they had confirmed the observation.
Since then, many more exoplanets have been discovered. According to the US space agency NASA, the discovery of over 5600 exoplanets has been confirmed to date. Researchers assume that there are billions of them.
Today, the 58-year-old Queloz is the director of a center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) that studies the origin and distribution of life on and off the earth. The 82-year-old Mayor is now retired.
©Keystone/SDA
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