Michel Mayor

Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor was born on 12 January 1942 and built his career as a Swiss astrophysicist at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. In 1995, working with Didier Queloz, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi - a breakthrough that reshaped astronomy's understanding of planetary systems and Earth's place in the cosmos. The discovery brought him the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize, the 2015 Kyoto Prize, and, alongside Queloz and Jim Peebles, the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. He formally retired in 2007 but continues as an active researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He has noted that humans will never migrate to such exoplanets - they are "much, much too far away" and would take "hundreds of millions of days" to reach - though his work has made the search for extraterrestrial communications from those distant worlds a more practical prospect than it once seemed.