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A Sun-Like Star with the First Planet Found Around It

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A Sun-Like Star with the First Planet Found Around It

Pegasus's Great Square marks the winged horse's body, and its corner stars, as its own article notes, double as lunar-mansion markers in several other sky-reckoning traditions. A different star entirely within the same constellation opened an entire field of modern astronomy.

In 1995, the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, a planet orbiting the Sun-like star 51 Pegasi, the first exoplanet ever confirmed around a star broadly similar to our own Sun. The planet itself was strange by the standards later exoplanet science expected, a gas giant roughly the mass of Jupiter orbiting closer to its star than Mercury orbits the Sun, a configuration nobody had predicted and that forced astronomers to rethink assumptions about how planetary systems form. Mayor and Queloz shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery, three decades after making it, once thousands of further exoplanets had confirmed the method and the field it launched.

None of this involves Bellerophon or Medusa or the tamed horse the constellation depicts; 51 Pegasi is simply one star among the many making up the winged horse's outline, chosen by two astronomers for reasons of instrument sensitivity and target selection rather than myth.

The horse that carried a hero to Olympus in Greek legend turns out, in one small corner of its own outline, to have opened the modern search for other worlds.

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