Here’s Didier Queloz talking about the discovery of that first known exoplanet.

“At that time I didn’t think at all it was a planet. I just thought something was wrong.”

Here are the official citations for this year’s winners:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”

With one half to James Peebles at Princeton University “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor at the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and the University of Cambridge, UK.

But what about Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz?

In October 1995 the duo announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system. Using custom-made instruments, they spotted the Jupiter-like planet 51 Pegasi b from the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France.

The work led to a surge of similar such discoveries. Today, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been spotted in the Milky Way, and the discoveries keep on coming. These are wild and wonderful worlds. The easiest to spot are vast, blisteringly-hot gas giants that swing around their parent stars on extremely close-in orbits. Others appear to be rocky and lurk in the habitable zone, where liquid water would run freely. Still others are thought to be exotic water worlds: their entire surface an ocean.

As more planets are found, and more observatories are launched in to orbit, or switched on here on Earth, astronomers are getting closer to answering what is perhaps one of the most profound questions humans ask: are we alone?

the guardian