From various sources this news about former SF State Professor Geoff Marcy and his former graduate student Paul Butler winning the 14th annual Discover Magazine Award for Innovation in Space and Technology.

What did they do to win this? They only proved there were planets outside our solar system. They did it by measuring the infinitesimal shifts in orbit of stars millions of light-years away, which corresponds to gravitational pull of a nearby body, i.e., a planet, or in Marcy's words:

"We examine the Doppler shift of the starlight. Each night, we obtain a new measurement of that Doppler shift. Those measurements tell us the speed of the star, as it wobbles around, due to the gravitational pull exerted by the planet on the star. That's how we detect 'dem planets." (Excerpt from earthsky.com's 'Meet the Scientist' email interview).

The story, at Discover Magazine, is a good read.