In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz presented the first solid evidence for the existence outside our own Solar System of a planetary-mass body orbiting a Sun-like star. The number of likely extrasolar planets has since grown to more than 100, and both NASA and its European equivalent, ESA, have plans to continue the search from space. Their ultimate goal is the discovery and characterization of Earth-like, habitable planets in orbit around nearby stars. In less than a decade the detection of extrasolar planets has gone from a field without a single credible example to one in which new detections are presented frequently, with a future that seems limitless. Within the next decade we will know how many Earth-like planets there are in the solar neighbourhood, and then we will have some idea about how many of them may support life.
展开▼
