2019 Physics Nobel Prize for research on exoplanets

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded this year to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of the first planet orbiting around a star similar to our Sun in 1995. Branco Weiss Fellow Xavier Dumusque collaborates closely at the University of Geneva with the two laureates. “Michel is retired now, but he is never very far and still keeps an open eye on what we are doing. With Didier we are currently designing a new instrument that may allow us to detect planets similar to Earth in the next decade” says Xavier Dumusque.

Xavier Dumusque’s research focuses on improving the current techniques used to search for exoplanets, to allow the detection of a habitable Earth-like planet in the near future. On one side he builds instruments to obtain unprecedent measurements, and on the other he develops state-of-the-art analysis techniques to extract from those measurements the tiny signature of Earth-like planet buried inside noisy data.

The announcement of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics is in a away a reward for the work on exoplanets science in general, which is now at the forefront of physics.

Read it on the Nobel Prize website