America's TIME Magazine has named Michaël Gillon, the FNRS qualified researcher and astronomer at the University of Liège, in its annual list of the world's 100 most influential people.
As TIME Editor-in-Chief Nancy Gibbs has, in the past, said of the list: “Each year our TIME 100 list lets us step back and measure the forces that move us…. One way or another they each embody a breakthrough: they broke the rules, broke the record, broke the silence, broke the boundaries to reveal what we're capable of.”
Michaël Gillon therefore appears in the list under the "Pioneers" section, with his colleagues Natalie Batalha and Guillem Anglada-Escudé.
Michaël Gillon's nomination follows the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanetary system, revealed to the public in an article published in Nature and during a press conference, last February, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. TRAPPIST-1 is the system that has both the largest number of telluric planets and the largest number of potentially habitable worlds ever discovered. So a good reason to pay tribute to these "discoverers"!
PS: there is another Belgian on the list, the designer Raf Simons.
