TEN years ago this week, the world awoke to a discovery that changed perceptions of our place in this universe forever. On 6 October 1995, Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland went public with their discovery of a planet circling another sun-like star. It was the latest milestone on the journey Copernicus began when he concluded that Earth was not the centre of the solar system. Now even our solar system was no longer a one-off.
Some 160 "exoplanets" later, nothing quite like our own solar system has yet been found. But as the catalogue of alien worlds expands, trends are emerging: some understandable, some baffling, but all challenging our preconceptions of how planets form. There are hints of Earth-like worlds out there, and new technologies for detecting them promise to make the next decade as dizzying as the one gone by. "We are very ...
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