Michel Mayor
active c. 1942, Lausanne, Switzerland
Swiss astronomer, co-discoverer of the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star (51 Pegasi b).
Mayor built the radial-velocity spectrograph ELODIE at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence; in 1995 he and his student Didier Queloz announced 51 Pegasi b — a 'hot Jupiter' orbiting its star every 4.2 days, surprising planet-formation theory. He went on to develop HARPS, discovering hundreds of exoplanets.
Nobel-winning work
51 Pegasi b (Mayor–Queloz, 1995) was the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star, detected via the star's 60 m/s radial-velocity 'wobble'. The discovery opened a new field of astronomy — over 5000 exoplanets are now known, many in systems utterly unlike the Solar System, laying the groundwork for the search for extraterrestrial life.
Workplaces: University of Geneva
Switzerland