Planet X: A new member of the Solar System club? ![]() When the European space telescope CHEOPS was launched in 2019 with the aim of determining the size of known exoplanets, Queloz’s first goal was to study 55 Cancri e. ![]() Today – just 26 years after the discovery – more than 4,500 exoplanets have been identified. It was a giant gas planet orbiting star 51 Pegasi, 50 light years from Earth. The two Swiss astronomers won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019 for their 1995 discovery of the first planet outside the Solar System, which is known as an exoplanet. “This is the only planet of this type that we are able to observe,” Queloz tells EL PAÍS, while visiting Madrid alongside his mentor, Michel Mayor, to give a conference at the European Space Agency Centre (ESAC). It’s what the astronomers call a world of lava. It’s likely that the entire planet is covered in melted rock. The surface is more than 2,000✬, and the dark side is at 1,300✬. On this planet, a hemisphere is always facing the Sun. But there it is: 40 light years from Earth, orbiting a twin star of the Sun. ![]() Julian Rojasįor the past months, astronomers Michel Mayor, 78, and Didier Queloz, 55, have been observing an “impossible planet.” It’s called 55 Cancri e and it is a bit bigger than Earth. ![]() Nobel laureates Michel Mayor (l) and Didier Queloz in the European Space Agency Center in Villafranca del Castillo.
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