From the margins to the mainstream: Nobel celebrates exoplanets!

Abstract

This year’s Physics Nobel Prize was jointly awarded to three scientists. Phillip James Peebles from Princeton University, USA, received one half of the prize for his seminal work on physical cosmology, and other half was shared by Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the discovery of an exoplanet around a solar-type star 51 Peg. While James Peeble’s contribution helped us understand the structure and evolution of the Universe at large scale, the exoplanet discovery was a watershed moment in humanity’s quest to seek answers to fundamental questions about the existence of planets and life elsewhere in the Universe. Exoplanet research, once a marginal field, has now become a principal area of research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the context of exoplanetary search, we will trace the historical development of the subject and how new ideas and technological innovations paved the way for the rapidly expanding field of exoplanets.