Didier Queloz

Didier Queloz (born February 23, 1966) is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Queloz and Mayor received one half of the prize; the other half was awarded to Canadian-born American physicist James Peebles.

Queloz received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Geneva in 1990 and a doctorate from the same university in 1995. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Geneva from 1996 to 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He returned to Geneva in 2000 and became a professor there in 2008. In 2013 Queloz became a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, while continuing to be a professor at Geneva.

In 1994 Queloz and Mayor, who was his advisor, began observing 142 stars at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. They were using a new spectrograph called ELODIE that would provide accurate measurements of a star’s radial velocity (that is, its velocity toward or away from the observer). When a planet orbits a star, the planet and the star orbit around their common centre of mass, and the star’s motion around the centre of mass can be seen as a shift in the star’s spectral lines. ELODIE could detect changes in a star’s radial velocity of 13 metres per second, which is about the same amount of radial velocity change that the Sun is moved by its largest planet, Jupiter. Because Jupiter takes nearly 12 Earth years to orbit the Sun, Queloz and Mayor were not expecting quick results.

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Observations of the star 51 Pegasi began that September. In January 1995 Queloz and Mayor detected a planet, 51 Pegasi b, with a mass about half that of Jupiter and a period of 4.23 days, which they confirmed and announced later that year. The existence of 51 Pegasi b, a planet unlike any in the solar system, surprised astronomers, and its discovery opened up a new field of astronomy, the study of extrasolar planets. Over more than two decades after Queloz and Mayor discovered 51 Pegasi b, thousands of extrasolar planets became known.

Queloz and Mayor collaborated on further searches for extrasolar planets. Beginning in 1998, they used the CORALIE spectrograph at La Silla Observatory in Chile to search for planets around 1,647 nearby stars. The CORALIE project has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates. They also collaborated on the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) project, which used a spectrometer at La Silla to observe radial velocity changes of 30 cm per second. HARPS began observations in 2003 and has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates, including several “super-Earths,” rocky planets that are more massive than Earth.