Is there life elsewhere?

Twenty-five years ago, two Swiss astronomers made the first discovery of an extrasolar planet in the Pegasus constellation – a milestone in astronomical research. What have we learned since then?

Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were the first to discover a planet outside our solar system back in 1995, establishing the University of Geneva as a global centre for exoplanet research. The giant planet they found was in a four-day orbit around the nearby star 51 Pegasi.

Since then, astronomers around the world have discovered thousands of exoplanets. Today’s telescopes are capable of detecting different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, cosmic rays, neutrinos or gravitational waves.

And Queloz has continued his involvement, searching and finding extrasolar planets as part of the Astrophysics Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and at the University of Geneva.

In this video he tells swissinfo.ch what we’ve discovered so far, and how future telescopes will one day reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.