The discovery of a large number of planetary systems around stars other than our Sun has turned our place in the Universe on its head. The diversity of these other worlds raises the question of our origins and the chain of processes needed to lead to the emergence of life on Earth.
Didier Queloz, astrophysicist at the Universities of Cambridge and Geneva, enthusiastically leads us on this wonderful adventure, explaining what we have learned and the surprises along the way regarding the diversity of stellar systems. Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019 for their 1995 discovery of the first extra-solar planet. CNRS describes their discovery in this article.
This conference was held at the Astrophysics Institute of Paris (IAP), co-organised with the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, on 30 June 2015, as part of the 31st internal IAP symposium entitled “From super-Earths to brown dwarfs: Who’s Who?”.
For more information: Explore exoplanet diversity via the entertaining application from NASA (in English): Eyes on Exoplanets. A Web version is also available. The images used for the exoplanets are extrapolated from their measured characteristics.