51 Pegasi

51 Pegasi, fifth-magnitude star located 48 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, the first sunlike star confirmed to possess a planet. 51 Pegasi, which has physical properties (luminosity and temperature, for example) very similar to those of the Sun, became the focus of attention in 1995 when Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the detection of a planet orbiting it. (Mayor and Queloz won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.) The extrasolar planet, 51 Pegasi b, is not visible from Earth, but its presence was deduced from the wobble that its gravity induces in the parent star’s motion in a 4.23-day cycle. It has a mass 46 percent that of Jupiter and orbits surprisingly close (7.8 million km [4.8 million miles]) to the star—much closer than Mercury orbits the Sun (at a distance of 57.9 million km [35.9 million miles]).