Michel Mayor

Biography

Michel Mayor was born in 1942 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his PhD from the University of Geneva, where he worked for most of his career. Before discovering exoplanets, he studied binary stars and Galactic dynamics. Together with Didier Queloz, he developed the ELODIE spectrograph, which made it possible to detect the faint wobbles in the star's radial velocity.

Key discoveries

• 51 Pegasi b (1995) – first planet outside the Solar System
• orbiting a main-sequence star. It is a 'hot Jupiter'
• with an orbital period of about 4 days. The radial velocity method
• used for the discovery
• became standard. Development of high-precision spectrographs (CORALIE
• HARPS)
• which allowed the discovery of hundreds of other exoplanets
• including Earth-type planets.