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51 Pegasi b
Summary
51 Pegasi b, officially named Dimidium dI'mIdi@m, is an extrasolar planet approximately away in the constellation of Pegasus. It was the first exoplanet to be discovered orbiting a main-sequence star, the Sun-like 51 Pegasi, and marked a breakthrough in astronomical research. It is the prototype for a class of planets called hot Jupiters.
In 2017, traces of water were discovered in the planet's atmosphere. In 2019, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in part for the discovery of 51 Pegasi b.
51 Pegasi is the Flamsteed designation of the host star. The planet was originally designated 51 Pegasi b by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who discovered the planet in December 1995. The following year it was unofficially dubbed "Bellerophon" bE'lEr@fQn by astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, who followed the convention of naming planets after Greek and Roman mythological figures (Bellerophon is a figure from Greek mythology who rode the winged horse Pegasus).
In July 2014, the International Astronomical Union launched NameExoWorlds, a process for giving proper names to certain exoplanets and their host stars. The process involved public nomination and voting for the new names. In December 2015, the IAU announced the winning name for this planet was Dimidium. The name was submitted by the Astronomische Gesellschaft Luzern, Switzerland. 'Dimidium' is Latin for 'half', referring to the planet's mass of approximately half the mass of Jupiter.
The exoplanet's discovery was announced on October 6, 1995, by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva in the journal Nature. They used the radial velocity method with the ELODIE spectrograph on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence telescope in France and made world headlines with their announcement. For this discovery, they were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The planet was discovered using a sensitive spectroscope that could detect the slight and regular velocity changes in the star's spectral lines of around 70 metres per second.
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