“The challenge is to determine whether life is a common phenomenon in the universe”

Physicists Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor, recipients of the 4th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences (2011), explain how, in 1995, they discovered the first planet outside our solar system (51 Pegasi b), a finding that sparked a revolution in astronomy. They highlight that thousands of exoplanets are now known, and that the great challenge ahead is to study their atmospheres and composition in order to identify rocky worlds in habitable zones and, in the future, search for signs of life beyond our solar system.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category has been granted, in its fourth edition, to the Swiss astrophysicists Michel G. E. Mayor and Didier Queloz, for their pathbreaking development of new astronomical instruments and experimental techniques that led to the observation of planets outside the solar system.