Lectures by Nobel laureates inaugurated the second day of the World Copernican Congress. Swiss astronomer Professor Didier Queloz focused his presentation ‘Exoplanets and Life in the Universe’ on an issue correlated with the World Copernican Congress. 

“I will talk about something that broadens the perspective of Copernican theory. Copernicus changed, in a way, the concept of the perception of the world, the perception of the planets, because our planet is, when viewed from the outside, the same as any other planet. We have managed to discover many planets, but the revolution is happening all the time. This also applies to life itself”, he said. 

Didier Queloz is a researcher at the University of Cambridge, the University of Geneva and ETH Zurich. In 2019, together with Michel Mayor, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. Queloz and Mayor received half of the prize for this discovery, with the other half awarded to James Peebles. All three Nobel laureates are guests of the Congress.