New Hope in the Search for Alien Life

摘要

For the first 15 years of discovers existence, if yournwanted to hear about planets orbiting other stars, you had your choice of sources: Star Wars and Star Trek. That all changed in 1995 with the discovery of a planet orbiting 51 Pegasi, a near-twin of the sun located about 50 light-years away. Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found the distant world by watching its gravity tug its parent star. Over the following year, American scientists Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler confirmed the observation and soon found several more planets on their own.