The Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, winners this Tuesday with the Nobel Prize in Physics with the Canadian James Peebles, achieved with their discoveries that searching for exoplanets was not science fiction, but real science.
And it is that Mayor and Queloz developed new astronomical instruments and techniques that got the observation of planets outside our Solar System: the exoplanets.
In 1995 they discovered the first one, which orbited a solar-type star (51 Pegasi).
Since then, the scientific community has identified almost 4,000: “they turned what looked like science fiction into real science,” Jose Antonio Caballero, of the Spanish Astrobiology Center (CAB), told Efe.
For astrophysicists there are two big questions.
One of them includes three that are answered at the same time: where the universe is coming from, how it will end and what it is made of, underlines this researcher, who adds that the other question is whether we are alone in the universe.
While the latter is more philosophical, scientists “try to go slowly,” added this scientist at the CAB.
To do this, first “we want to detect planets.” 51 Pegasi b, the planet discovered by these two astronomers, was a body of mass similar to that of Jupiter that takes a full turn around its star four days and not 365, and “that was exotic.”
“But every time we detect planets that by size or orbit are more like Earth. The objective is to detect planets like the Earth around a star like the Sun, and at the same distance between our planet and the Sun. For now we have not achieved it but every year that passes we get closer,” he said.
For his part, Guillem Anglada Escudé, from the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences, told Efe that the findings of Mayor and Queloz, a doctoral student of the first at that time, have led to the finding that planets are abundant in the universe, and that, therefore, “Earth-like sites must exist, although we are still looking for them.”
The proof that those of Mayor and Queloz are discoveries that have greatly influenced how it is observed and what is sought in the universe, is that 20 years after discovering 51 Pegasi b, all space agencies have programs and missions exclusively dedicated to exoplanets, a subject that practically did not exist.
“They put it almost in the box of those looking for UFOs,” added this researcher, also an expert on exoplanets.
It is, he argued, an award “deserved. It will be said that there are others who surely deserved it too (…), I agree. But we must not take credit from Mayor and Queloz”, and ultimately it implies “recognition of the whole field and all of us who work on it.”
The two scientists received in 2012 the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category for their pioneering development of instruments and techniques to observe exoplanets.
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Source: Elimparcial
