Researched
Exoplanet discovery
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first planet around a Sun-like star, opening the era of exoplanet science.
Open in the interactive tree →A planet around a pulsar was found in 1992, but 51 Peg b (Nobel Prize in Physics 2019) showed that ordinary stars host planets. Kepler (2009) and TESS (2018) found thousands by transits. Statistics suggest about one in five Sun-like stars has an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone.
Prerequisites
- The telescope1608
- Newtonian Mechanics1687Radial-velocity planet detection fits Newtonian orbital motion
- Spectroscopy185951 Peg b was found from Doppler shifts in its star's spectrum
- Programmable Computer1941