On Tuesday, Professor Didier Queloz, from Switzerland, said he was “convinced” of the existence of extraterrestrial life after winning the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“I can’t believe we are the only living entity in the universe,” the Cambridge University professor said while speaking at the Science Media Centre in London, according to The Telegraph. “There are just way too many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal.
“The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere. So I am a strong believer that there must be life elsewhere.
“Life doesn’t just mean a green man coming to you, life started way before animals were crawling on the surface of earth.”
According to the professor, he is certain that humans will have detected alien life in 100 years' time.
However, he is convinced it will happen much sooner than that, once we have built more advanced technology capable of detecting life on distant planets.
Professor Queloz, who discovered the first planet outside our solar system while still a PhD student, won the Nobel Prize alongside fellow researcher Michel Mayor, his PhD supervisor at Princeton.
In 1995, Professor Queloz and Professor Mayor discovered the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b using the Doppler spectroscopy technique, which measures wobbles of a star as a planet orbits around it.
Since their initial discovery, more than 4,100 additional exoplanets have been found.
The Nobel Prize was awarded to the scientists for “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”, with half of the prize awarded to James Peebles, for “theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”.
The Independent
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