'It's a big shock': Michel Mayor wins Nobel physics prize 24 yrs after exoplanet discovery

Record ID: 1435992

  • Title: 'It's a big shock': Michel Mayor wins Nobel physics prize 24 yrs after exoplanet discovery
  • Date: 9th October 2019
  • Summary: TORREJON DE ARDOZ, SPAIN (OCTOBER 9, 2019) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF MICHEL MAYOR, ONE OF THE THREE 2019 NOBEL PHYSICS PRIZE WINNERS, SITTING DOWN (SOUNDBITE) (English) WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS, PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, SAYING: "It's a big shock because it's so huge. The impact of the Nobel prize is so huge in the community of scientists and also the general public so you cannot be not affected by this fact, and I'm very, very impressed by this fact. And not only for me, but also for all the people having contributed to this kind of discoveries, because you know, to detect this kind of very faint objects extrasolar planets you need instrumentation, very sensitive instrumentation and you are not doing this alone. You have a lot of colleagues, technicians, engineers, optician (inaudible) having been working with us. So it's also I'm thinking to all of these people having worked with us." WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS, PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, SAYING: "I knew that I was nominated for this, because always you have rumours. But you know, 24 years you cannot be every October perturbed by this kind of things, so I've decided to completely ignore this fact and everything. I was expecting, but not really doing any special things in October, and for example we went here (Spain) and I took commitments and in the past years we've had vacations sometimes as well, so OK you have to not be perturbed by this kind of idea. And the reason for that is very special: you have few hundred thousand people working in physics in the world; I don't know the number but you have huge discoveries done every day in many of these laboratories, and it's completely crazy to think you will receive the prize and not another domain. So and we have seen in the past you have cosmology, you have physics of materials CCD and so on. So and catheters are waves and so on. So I believe I was to really stick when I sing to all these colleagues that I've been doing this beautiful thing."
  • Embargoed: 23rd October 2019 10:34
  • Keywords: Physics Nobel Prize winner Michel Mayor interview Astrobiology Centre Nobel
  • Location: MADRID, SPAIN
  • City: MADRID, SPAIN
  • Country: Spain
  • Topics: Science,Space Exploration
  • Reuters ID: LVA001B0DLQVB
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A BROADCAST QUALITY EDIT THAT UPDATES EDIT 3150 / FRENCH SOUNDBITES OF INTERVIEW IN EDIT 3111
    Swiss scientist Michel Mayor said on Wednesday (October 9) that it was a "big shock" to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, 24 years after his joint discovery of a so-called "exoplanet".
    Mayor and Didier Queloz, of Switzerland's University of Geneva and Britain's Cambridge University, were award one half of the 9 million Swedish crown ($910,000) prize for the discovery in 1995 of a planet outside our own solar system.
    Since their discovery, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been found in the Milky Way, many of them nothing like our own world. Indeed, the first planet they found, 51 Pegasi b, orbits a sun 50 light years away that heats its surface to more than 1,000 degrees centigrade, the award-giving academy said.
    Mayor told Reuters that his trick was to develop an instrument able to "measure precisely the velocity of the star" and said that despite knowing he might be tipped for the prize in previous years, the award still came as a big surprise. He paid tribute to colleagues, technicians and engineers without whom, Mayor said, the discovery would not have been possible.
    The other half of the prize was awarded to Canadian-American cosmologist James Peebles of Princeton University in the United States for interpreting trace radiation from the infancy of the universe.
    (Production: Guillermo Martinez, Catherine Macdonald)
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