Nobel Week Dialogue
Didier Queloz
Nobel Prize in Physics 2019. Didier Queloz received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a star outside our solar system. His research has continued to focus on exoplanet systems, and more recently on the detection of Earth-like planets and universal life.
Didier Queloz is Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory and part-time professor of physics at ETH-Zurich. He is the founding director of the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe hosted by Cambridge University and ETH Centre for the Origin and Prevalence of Life.
In 1995, during his PhD, he was at the origin of the ‘exoplanet revolution’ in astrophysics, when he and his supervisor announced the first discovery of a giant planet orbiting another star, outside the solar system. They received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for this spectacular discovery that kick-started the rise of exoplanet research.
Over the next 25 years, Didier Queloz’s scientific contributions have been to make progress in detection and measurement of exoplanet systems with the goal to retrieve information on their physical structure to better understand their formation and evolution, and to compare with our solar system. More recently, his activity has focused on the detection of Earth-like planets, establishing a comprehensive research programme with the goal of making further progress in our understanding of habitability of exoplanets and life in the universe.
More about Didier Queloz and the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.