Queloz, Didier Patrick

Queloz, Didier Patrick, 1966–, Swiss astronomer, Ph.D. Univ. of Geneva, 1995. He has been a member of the faculty at the Univ. of Geneva since 2003 (professor from 2008) and since 2013 also has been a professor at Cambridge. Queloz was jointly awarded half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Michel Mayor for their discovery in 1995 of the first exoplanet found orbiting a sunlike star; they shared the prized with James Peebles, who received it for his work in cosmology. Queloz and Mayor, his graduate adviser, used Doppler spectroscopy (see planetary system) to identify a Jupiter-sized planet in a close orbit around 51 Pegasi. This discovery and other subsequent discoveries of exoplanets altered the understanding of planetary systems and their formation.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Astronomy: Biographies