Didier Queloz

We have a whole new discipline opened up by discovering a new class of astronomical object, exoplanets.

Exomoons, they I doubt have quite the same impact as that awakening moment of Michel Maillot discovering the first exoplanet with Didier Queloz, but I suspect it would still be a profound discovery that would open up entirely new disciplines within science.

It's their loss.

So I'm trying to remain positive about this.

On October 6th, 1995, two Swiss astronomers stood in front of a room full of colleagues at a conference in Florence, Italy, and announced something that should have been impossible.

Michel Maier and Didier Queloz had found a planet orbiting a star called 51 Pegasi, a sun-like star roughly 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

The planet was enormous, roughly half the mass of Jupiter, and it was orbiting absurdly close to its parent star, completing a full orbit every 4.2 days.

No existing model of planetary formation predicted that a gas giant could exist so close to its star.

Then, in 1995, everything changed.

Michel Meyer and Didier Queloz, two Swiss astronomers working at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southeastern France, announced the first confirmed detection of a planet orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system.

The star was called 51 Pegasi, an unremarkable yellow dwarf roughly 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

The planet, 51 Pegasi b, was nothing like what anyone expected.