Mayor, Michel Gustave Edward, 1942–, Swiss astrophysicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Geneva, 1971. He spent his entire career at the Univ. of Geneva, retiring as professor emeritus in 2007. In 2019 Mayor and Didier Queloz were jointly awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics their discovery of the first exoplanet to be found orbiting a sunlike star; they shared the prized with James Peebles, who received it for his work in cosmology. In 1995 Mayor and Queloz, Mayor's graduate student, announced the discovery of a planet orbiting the sunlike star 51 Pegasi; the discovery was made using Doppler spectroscopy (see planetary system; see also planet). Their discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting close to its star and other astronomical discoveries that followed altered the understanding of planetary systems and their formation.
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