It All Started With A Pulsar
Though Mayor and Queloz discovered the first widely accepted exoplanet in 1995, their search was triggered by Aleksander Wolazczan and Dale Frail, who have been exploring the two other planets orbiting the same star since 1992. But they soon withdrew from the program and left the study midway. Afterwhich, Mayor and Queolz took the scene and started their research. Unlike the sun, the star was completely different, and it was a pulsar, a dense core corpse of a giant star rotating rapidly. At regular intervals, the pulsar would leave a beam of radiation on the Earth, similar to the light from a distant lighthouse. When the exoplanets orbit around their host star, they tend to exert a gravitational tug on the pulsar, making it wobble. Such wiggles would make subtle transformations in the frequencies.
Though Mayor and Queloz were able to find the transformations in the pulsar’s frequencies, which were significant findings in astronomy, they needed something more. They had to put in some more work and research into the matter to make their discovery more authentic and bring the concept to the mainstream. The idea of planets other than the ones in our solar system surviving a supernova orbiting around the pulsars was still a mystery to be solved.