My trick was to be able to measure the exact velocity of the star - Nobel Physics Prize winner
Record ID:
1435997
My trick was to be able to measure the exact velocity of the star - Nobel Physics Prize winner
- Title: My trick was to be able to measure the exact velocity of the star - Nobel Physics Prize winner
- Date: 9th October 2019
- Summary: TORREJON DE ARDOZ, MADRID, SPAIN (OCTOBER 9, 2019) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF MICHEL MAYOR, ONE OF THE THREE 2019 NOBEL PHYSICS PRIZE WINNERS, WALKING IN THE HALLWAYS OF THE ASTROBIOLOGY CENTRE IN TORREJON DE ARDOZ VARIOUS OF MAYOR POSING FOR MEDIA (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS, SAYING: "It's a big shock because it's a huge announcement. The impact of the Nobel prize is so huge in the community of scientists and also the general public. Evidently you cannot be not affected by this fact and I am very, very impressed by this fact and, not only for me, but for all the people having contributed to this kind of discovery." MAYOR WALKING AND MEETING MEMBERS OF THE ASTROBIOLOGICAL CENTRE (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS, SAYING: "I knew I was nominated for this because always you hear rumours, but you know, for 24 years you cannot be, every October, perturbed by these kinds of things, so I decided to completely ignore this fact. I was expecting (it) but not really doing any special things in October. For example we went here (to Spain), I took commitments, in the past we have taken vacations sometimes and so on. You have to not be perturbed by these kinds if ideas and the reason for that is very special: you have a 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 is completely crazy to believe that you will receive the prize and not another domain." VARIOUS OF MAYOR CHATTING (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS, SAYING (SPEAKING OF HIS DISCOVERY): "What I would say what is the most exciting is when you, with some colleagues, 10 - 15 engineers and technicians, you develop a new instrument. And the first night you are in the dome and at some moment you realise this instrument is working like you are expecting. And you measure the velocity of a star and you get a value, and then after you repeat the measurement you get exactly the same value, maybe with a very small difference. And I believe this for me was humanly the most exciting moment." MAYOR STANDING NEXT TO HIS WIFE CHATTING (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS, SAYING: "In fact we had no way, at least 20 years ago, to see the planet but what you can see is a small wobble of the velocity of the star. So you measure precisely the velocity of the star and, after a few calculations, if the star is moving like this (signals) there is something perturbing its orbit and you infer the period, the shape of the orbit, the mass of the components and so on. All the trick was to develop a spectrograph, an instrument able to measure precisely the velocity of the star because the planets are much, much smaller than the star, so evidently the impact is very small. And for example if you consider the solar system, the sun is moving at 11 metres per second, due to the impact of Jupiter. But the earth indices a wobble of only eight centimetre per second. It's so small. Let's imagine a change of the velocity of eight centimetres during one year. And this is the real difficulty we have been facing to detect planets." MAYOR POSING FOR MEDIA (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR MICHEL MAYOR, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS, SAYING: "Now you have different techniques like the Keeper satellite where you are looking for planets crossing, the disk of the star or some kind of eclipse. There have been a huge amount of discoveries made by the Keeper satellite or the one before and you have still other techniques, but the first technique we have been using was the problem of the change of the velocity. So at the time we didn't see the planet itself, it's only an indirect detection. It's only after that we were able to see the planets." MAYOR CHATTING AND GREETING PEOPLE
- Embargoed: 23rd October 2019 12:45
- 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: LVA001B0DLRNR
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: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) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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