Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.
Geoffrey William Marcy is an American astronomer. He was an early influence in the field of exoplanet detection, discovery, and characterization. Marcy was a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University. Marcy and his research teams discovered many extrasolar planets, including 70 out of the first 100 known exoplanets and also the first planetary system around a Sun-like star, Upsilon Andromedae. Marcy was a co-investigator on the NASA Kepler mission. His collaborators have included R. Paul Butler, Debra Fischer and Steven S. Vogt, Jason Wright, Andrew Howard, Katie Peek, John Johnson, Erik Petigura, Lauren Weiss, Lea Hirsch and the Kepler Science Team.
Robert Paul Butler is an astronomer and staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who searches for extrasolar planets.
47 Ursae Majoris, formally named Chalawan, is a yellow dwarf star approximately 46 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Ursa Major. As of 2011, three extrasolar planets are believed to orbit the star.
HD 45350 is a solar analog star with an exoplanetary companion in the northern constellation of Auriga. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 7.89, which means it is an 8th magnitude star that is too dim to be readily visible to the naked eye. The system is located at a distance of 153 light-years from the Sun based on parallax measurements, but is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −21 km/s.
Upsilon Andromedae c, formally named Samh, is an extrasolar planet orbiting the Sun-like star Upsilon Andromedae A every 241.3 days. Its discovery in April 1999 by Geoffrey Marcy and R. Paul Butler made this the first multiple-planet system to be discovered around a main-sequence star, and the first multiple-planet system known in a multiple star system. Upsilon Andromedae c is the second known planet in order of distance from its star.
These are lists of exoplanets. As of 1 November 2022, there are 5,246 confirmed exoplanets in 3,875 planetary systems, with 842 systems having more than one planet. Most of these were discovered by the Kepler space telescope. There are an additional 2,056 potential exoplanets from Kepler's first mission yet to be confirmed, as well as 969 from its "Second Light" mission and 3,945 from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission.
Sara Seager is a Canadian-American astronomer and planetary scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her work on extrasolar planets and their atmospheres. She is the author of two textbooks on these topics, and has been recognized for her research by Popular Science, Discover Magazine, Nature, and TIME Magazine. Seager was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 citing her theoretical work on detecting chemical signatures on exoplanet atmospheres and developing low-cost space observatories to observe planetary transits.
Pi Mensae b, also known as HD 39091 b, is an extrasolar planet approximately 59 light-years away in the constellation of Mensa. The planet was announced orbiting the yellow main-sequence star Pi Mensae in October 2001.
HD 154345 is a star in the northern constellation of Hercules. With an apparent visual magnitude of +6.76 it is a challenge to view with the naked eye, but using binoculars it is an easy target. The distance to this star is 59.7 light years based on parallax, but it is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −47 km/s. At least one exoplanet is orbiting this star.
55 Cancri f, also designated Rho1 Cancri f and formally named Harriot, is an exoplanet approximately 41 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cancer. 55 Cancri f is the fourth known planet from the star 55 Cancri and the first planet to have been given the designation of "f".
HIP 79431 b is an extrasolar planet discovered by the W. M. Keck Observatory in 2010. The planet is found in an M type dwarf star catalogued as HIP 79431 and is located within the Scorpius constellation approximately 47 light years away from the Earth. Its orbital period lasts about 111.7 days and has an orbital eccentricity of 0.29. The planet is the 6th giant planet to be detected in the Doppler surveys of M dwarfs and is considered to be one of the most massive planets found around M dwarf stars.
Steven Scott Vogt is an American astronomer of German descent whose main interest is the search for extrasolar planets.
The N2K Consortium is a collaborative multinational effort by American, Chilean and Japanese astronomers to find additional extrasolar planets around stars that are not already being surveyed. The N2K is shorthand for the set of roughly 2,000 of the nearest and most luminous main sequence stars that were selected to be newly surveyed. Target stars have a B - V color index value between 0.4 and 1.2, a visual magnitude brighter than 10.5, and a distance of less than 110 pc from the Sun. They were selected based upon their high metallicity, which is the abundance of elements other than hydrogen and helium.
The Fiber-Optic Improved Next-Generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths is a radial-velocity spectrograph developed by Debra Fischer. It is installed on the 3 meter telescope in Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton. It has been in operation since 2009 and is being used to verify exoplanet candidates found by Kepler.
William J. (Bill) Borucki is a space scientist who worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. Upon joining NASA in 1962, Borucki designed the heat shields for Apollo program spacecraft. He later turned his attention to the optical efficiency of lightning strikes in the atmospheres of planets, investigating the propensity that these lightning strikes could create molecules that would later become the precursors for life. Subsequently, Borucki's attention turned to extrasolar planets and their detection, particularly through the transit method. In light of this work, Borucki was named the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission, launched on March 6, 2009 and dedicated to a transit-based search for habitable planets. In 2013, Borucki was awarded the United States National Academy of Sciences's Henry Draper Medal for his work with Kepler. In 2015 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.
Tabetha "Tabby" Suzanne Boyajian is an American astronomer of Armenian descent and astrophysicist on faculty at Louisiana State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow 2012–16 at Yale University, working with Debra Fischer. Boyajian is active in the astronomical fields of stellar interferometry, stellar spectroscopy, exoplanet research, and high angular resolution astronomy, all particularly at optical and infrared wavelengths. She was the lead author of the September 2015 paper "Where's the Flux?", which investigated the highly unusual light curve of KIC 8462852; the star is colloquially known as Tabby's Star in her honor.
HD 131496 is an evolved subgiant star in the constellation Boötes. With an apparent visual magnitude of 7.9 it is too faint to be visible to the naked eye. Stars like HD 131496 are sometimes referred to as "retired A-stars", since they would have been A-type stars while on the main sequence. This name is most commonly used in connection with the search for extrasolar planets, where they are useful because these evolved stars are cooler and have more spectral lines than their main sequence counterparts, making planet detection easier.
