The Origins of Exoplanet Study
Up until the mid-1990s, our only knowledge of planets came from our own Solar System. Every theory about how planets formed was based on just eight planets orbiting a single star. This limited perspective was a bit like trying to understand all of humanity by studying a small group of people living in one house. The sheer size of the universe—with an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone—highlighted how little we truly knew.