Nobel Prize for first exoplanet discovery

[bland]

TL;DR

Why is the Nobel committee acting as though the discovery was of the same order as the discovery that Andromeda was another galaxy.

Summary: Why is the Nobel committee acting as though the discovery was of the same order as the discovery that Andromeda was another galaxy.

Now this has been bugging me since ever. but the Nobel committee brought it up again "This discovery (1995 exoplanet) has opened up a Universe far stranger and more wonderful than we could ever have imagined".

That's exactly true for the discovery of the first exoGalaxy, as it were, because our Galaxy at the time was the universe, and now there's a universe filled with universes. Contrast this with the exoplanet, it's not as if we didn't know exoplanets existed. I mean obviously the Galaxy must have hundreds of billions of planets. So we already were imagining planets out there after all we didn't expect alien life to live on a star.

If anything it's made the universe less wonderful. Before the discovery, I still had my doubts that there was any other life in the universe, but I like everyone else of course knew there's billions of planets, and we knew we were going to find them, but I'm pretty certain that if you told someone in say 1980 that within 40 years 4000 extra solar planets would be discovered, how many did they suppose might support life, I'm sure their answer would be far more wonderful that 'none, not even close', mainly just large balls of gas.

 

[andrew s 1905]

I think our view of what a solar system looks like and how they evolve has been radically changed by the variety of planetary system we have found. Without the first the subsequent searches may well not have happened or been more limited.

By the way how did we know they existed? It was just speculation.

Regards Andrew

 

[bland]

By the way how did we know they existed? It was just speculation.

Well that is precisely the point I'm making. It wasn't speculation unless you accept that the Sun had the only solar system in the universe which makes us pretty super special. But apparently it's absurd to think we are the only life in the universe because that would be too super special.

Look the discovery is wonderful and the cosmology is amazing, It is my belief that there is no other life in the universe, and that's a valid belief, but many people would greet that with howls of outrage even though there is no evidence at all. In fact it's more valid because the alternative argument is 'oh there simply must be because there's so many planets' is of course is far less valid.

Maybe the Nobel committee chose their words badly, I'm thinking they may have had to dress it up a bit and got carried away.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm thinking they [the Nobel committee] may have had to dress it up a bit and got carried away.

First, this is what they wrote. Verbatim:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with one half to James Peebles [Princeton University, USA] “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor [University of Geneva, Switzerland] and Didier Queloz [University of Geneva, Switzerland University of Cambridge, UK] “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”

Nothing about life on other planets or a universe stranger or more wonderful than we can imagine. Nothing. You have no right to complain about what the committee wrote, because that's not the citation they wrote.

Second, every year about this time people complain about the Nobel committee. If you don't like it, you're free to make your own fortune and endow your own prize.

 

[Keith_McClary]

Desiring more accurate radial velocity measurements, Mayor, along with Baranne at Marseille, and with graduate student Didier Queloz, developed ELODIE, a new spectrograph based on the work of CORAVEL, which was estimated to have an accuracy of 15 m/s for bright stars, improving upon the 1 km/s from CORAVEL. ELODIE was developed with the specific intent to determine if the substellar secondary objects were brown dwarf stars or potentially giant planets.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Mayor

 

[Ratman]

What is bugging me is that this Nobel prize isn't really for first exoplanet discovery. It has been given for first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. This distinction completely ignores that the first confirmed exoplanetary system was discovered three years earlier, in 1992, by Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail. That was the real breaktrough after decades of speculations and unconfirmed (not necessarily wrong) claims. This omission is really unfair.

 

[Keith_McClary]

All the Exoplanets That Came Before 1995
Several exoplanets were found before the 1995 discovery that netted Mayor and Didier this year’s physics Nobel. Why weren’t the others honored?

https://www.insidescience.org/news/all-exoplanets-came-1995