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from the international-calls-take-on-a-new-meaning dept.
Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.
At the time, even the most adventurous minds blithely assumed that our solar system was more or less typical, a template for all the others. 51 Peg b threw a big splash of reality in their faces. The newfound world was bizarre, a Jupiter-size world skimming the surface of its star in a blistering-fast "year" that lasted just 4.2 days. Its existence ran counter to the standard theories of how planets form and evolve. It answered one big question: Yes, other planetary systems really do exist. But it raised a thousand others.
How long before we discover signals from one of those planets, and what will it mean for our civilization?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:40AM
I went to The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia [exoplanet.eu] and it's telling me there are 1977 confirmed extrasolar planets, with 198 that are "unconfirmed, controversial or retracted."
The article says:
(hyperlink in original). It seems that exoplanets.org uses different criteria than exoplanets.eu, and that of the 5,000 planets mentioned, the majority are unconfirmed.
But if unconfirmed discoveries may be counted, Wikipedia lists [wikipedia.org] several earlier discoveries. It says Gamma Cephei Ab [wikipedia.org] was suspected to exist from 1988, and was confirmed in 2002.
It also names HD 114762 b [wikipedia.org] as having been discovered in 1989, though its existence was not confirmed until 1991 (more than 20 years ago).
Finally, in the system PSR B1257+12 [wikipedia.org], three planets have been discovered, the first two in 1992 [nature.com] (also more than 20 years ago).