Discovery of First Exoplanet

Date: October 6, 1995 • Location: Rome, Italy

Astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz reported the discovery of a planet orbiting 51 Pegasi as the first known exoplanet around a main-sequence star.

Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.