Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2021

Exoplanets and 2019 Physics Nobel Prize

   In 2019 the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star. I would like to point out that the planet has not been discovered in 2019 or any year near that. 51 Pegasi b, was the first exoplanet ever found around a Sun-type star, is discovery was announced on 6 October 1995 by Mayor and Queloz, who detected it using the ELODIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France. This discovery revolutionised astronomy, initiating an entirely new field and new instruments focused on finding and characterising exoplanets.         Figure 1:  Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor at La Silla Introduction     Exoplanets or extrasolar planets, are planets outside the Solar System. From 1917 until 8 February 2021, has been discovered a total of 4,352 exoplanets in 3,257 systems, with 722 systems hosting more than one planet.     You might ask, how do we know that planets are there? How he can detec