Abstract
Professor Didier Queloz talks about his challenging journey from the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star in 1995 to the acknowledgement of his discovery by the scientific community. He explores his experience in reporting a paradigm-changing finding and how this triggered hard scepticism from the publishing industry and fellow scientists, which lasted about 3 years. He and Michel Mayor were eventually acknowledged as the founders of the new field of exoplanets and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019.
Highlights
Professor Didier Queloz talks about his challenging journey from the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star in 1995 to the acknowledgement of his discovery by the scientific community
There is a long story in exoplanet science[1,2] of false alarm or people claiming they found a planet and it was not a planet before we found the first one.[3]
I think it took some time for the community to realise that a new field was really setting up
Summary
Professor Didier Queloz talks about his challenging journey from the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star in 1995 to the acknowledgement of his discovery by the scientific community. People really working on the topic, there were maybe 50 people in the world, were pretty sure that the planet was real, but the community outside the field did not really know what to think about that and they all knew that the planet was awkward.[6] I think it took some time for the community to realise that a new field was really setting up.
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