Conference given by José Antonio Muñoz Lozano

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Universitat de València

Half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics has been given to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering, in 1995, the first planet outside our solar system. Since then more than 4000 planets have been discovered in our galaxy, the Milky Way, transforming our vision of planetary systems. In the next few years, new projects will allow to increase the census of planets, particularly the potentially habitable ones, to study the chemical composition of their atmospheres and, ultimately, the possibility that some of them host life.

James Peebles has been awarded the other half of the prize for his theoretical contributions to Cosmology. In the second part of the conference we will review the most basic aspects of the cosmological model and how he describes with amazing precision our Universe from a fraction of a second after the Big Bang to the current era, 13.8 billion years later.

Although Cosmology and Exoplanets are two completely different disciplines, the Nobel Committee has understood that Professors Peebles, Mayor and Queloz are deserving of the prize because their discoveries have contributed to changing our conception of the world for good.