page_title: Didier Queloz
section_title: Career and research
hierarchical_section_title: Didier Queloz / Career and research
caption_attribution_description: English: World-renowned Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory are seen here in front of ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. The telescope hosts HARPS, the world’s leading exoplanet hunter. They were awarded the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for their ground-breaking work on exoplanets.
context_page_description: Didier Patrick Queloz FRS is a Swiss astronomer. He is a professor 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 James Peebles and Michel Mayor. He also recently said that humans will likely find alien life in the next 30 years.
context_section_description: While Queloz was a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva under Mayor, Mayor had been working on improving the accuracy of detection of the radial velocity of stellar objects via Doppler spectroscopy. Mayor had previously developed the CORAVEL spectrometer that helped to measure these velocities to an accuracy of 1 km/s. Mayor had found from CORAVEL that some binary star systems may in fact be single star systems with a substellar secondary object in their orbit.  Queloz worked with Mayor to develop ELODIE, which was able to improve the accuracy of radial velocity measurements to 15 m/s to help better resolve these star systems' features.
  ELODIE was installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory by 1994, and Queloz and Mayor began surveying the candidate systems. By July 1995, the pair had discovered that a large planet orbited 51 Pegasi; the planet was identified as 51 Pegasi b and determined to be of a Hot Jupiter. This was the first exoplanet to be discovered around a main sequence star. Queloz' and Mayor's discovery launched a more intensive search for exoplanets around other stars. For this achievement, they were awarded half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star".
  Since these discoveries, Queloz became a professor at the University of Geneva, and in 2013, also became a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He collaborated with the United Kingdom team of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) program which seeks to detect exoplanets via transit photometry, helping to provide spectrographic confirmation of their findings in 2007. He also participated in CoRoT, a planetary-detection system from orbital observatories, and helped to confirm the first detection of a rocky exoplanet, COROT-7b, in 2011. He is now involved in the Next Generation Transit Survey, a ground based successor to WASP. The CHEOPS science team is chaired by Queloz.
  He is also a visiting scientist at MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
  Queloz received the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award of Basic Sciences (co-winner with Mayor) for developing new astronomical instruments and experimental techniques that led to the first observation of planets outside the solar system.
  In 2017, he received the Wolf Prize in Physics and in 2019, the Nobel Prize in Physics.
  In October 2019, related to his work in astronomy and exoplanet discoveries, Queloz predicted humans will discover extraterrestrial life in the next 30 years stating, "I can't believe we are the only living entity in the universe. There are just way [too] many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal. The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere. So I am a strong believer that there must be life elsewhere."
  In December 2019, Queloz took issue with those who are not supportive of helping to improve climate change, stating, “I think this is just irresponsible, because the stars are so far away I think we should not have any serious hope to escape the Earth [...] Also keep in mind that we are a species that has evolved and developed for this planet. We’re not built to survive on any other planet than this one [...] We’d better spend our time and energy trying to fix it.”
caption: Queloz (left) and Michel Mayor at the La Silla Observatory, 2012
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "World-renowned Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and\u00a0Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory are seen here in front of ESO\u2019s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. The telescope hosts HARPS, the world\u2019s leading exoplanet hunter. They were awarded the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for their ground-breaking work on exoplanets."}