Abstract
The study of exoplanets has revolutionized the scientific field of planet formation and changed scientific and public views on the possible frequency of life in the Universe. This has been motivated, at least to some extent, by the search for a second Earth. It started slowly with the first unambiguous evidence for an extrasolar planet announced by Alexander Wolszczan and Dale Andrew Frail (1992), and later confirmed by Wolszczan (1994). In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz in Geneva reported that they had found a planet at least half the size of Jupiter rapidly orbiting the star 51 Pegasi (Mayor and Queloz 1995) in a 4 day orbit. Geoff Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley soon confirmed this finding (Marcy and Butler 1996, 1998), and Marcy’s group has gone on to discover over 100 additional extrasolar planets. Since these initial findings, a flood of discoveries has brought the number of reported extrasolar planets to over 3800 as of this writing (for an update see https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/).
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