Dr. Marco Scharringhausen
DLR-RY, Robert-Hooke-Str.7, 28159 Bremen

"Exoplanets and the 2019 Noble Prize"

The 2019 Noble Prize in Physics has been awarded (by 50%) to two researchers that layed the foundation to todays' methods for the detection of planets outside our solar system. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz have been able to firstly detect a companion of a sun-like star. Previous detections of exoplanets have been present, however the central body in that case was a neutron star.

Existence of Exoplanets has been conjectured for a long time. Study of those celestial objects contributes much to our understanding of the evolution of our solar system as well as planetary physics.

We will consider both the history as well as the first detections in the early 1990s. Also, the state of the art along with modern methods and the latest space missions (Kepler 1/2, Corot, Tess, etc) for detection and investigation of exoplanets will be presented.

Finally, we will discuss upcoming scientific challenges and open questions such as why so many planetary systems look "different" from our solar system. Is this a result of observation biases or is our solar system really an exception?