The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
Awarded on: 2019-10-08
"for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star"
Affiliations:
- University of Geneva – Geneva, Switzerland
- University of Cambridge – Cambridge, United Kingdom
Didier Queloz
Born: 1966-02-23 in Geneva, Switzerland
Gender: male
Field: Swiss astronomer (born 1966)
Biography
Didier Patrick Queloz is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.