We are constantly surprised by the diversity of the other worlds.
- Didier Queloz
When the numbers began to filter through from the spectrograph that was measuring small shifts in light from distant stars, Didier Queloz at first thought they were wrong. He certainly didn’t think he’d discovered an exoplanet. He checked and re-checked.
“At some point I realised the only explanation could be that the numbers were right.”
Today, many regard the discovery of 51 Pegasi b by Queloz and Professor Michel Mayor at the University of Geneva in 1995 as a moment in astronomy that forever changed the way we understand the universe and our place within it. It was the first confirmation of an exoplanet – a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun. Until then, although astronomers had speculated as to the existence of these distant worlds, no planet other than those in our own solar system had ever been found.
“For centuries, we only had the one single example of our own solar system on which to base our knowledge of planets,” says Queloz, who moved to Cambridge’s Department of Physics two years ago. “If you wanted to understand botany, you wouldn’t build the botanic picture from one single flower – you need all the others.”
Of the 1,900 or so confirmed exoplanets that have now been found – a tenth of these by Queloz himself – many are different to anything we ever imagined, challenging existing theories of planet formation.
Watch a video and read the full story
Image: Artist’s impression of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting its nearby star
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Other worlds: Professor Didier Queloz and Dr William Bains consider what life might be like under the light of other suns at the Cambridge Science Festival on 17 March 2016
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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