The exoplanet explosion
In 1992, a discovery rocked the astronomy world when astronomers found a planet orbiting a pulsar in the Milky Way Galaxy. It was the first planet discovered outside our own solar system. Technology and emerging, clever techniques were on parallel tracks to give us immense new insight into the galaxy around us. Thirty years after the initial discovery, we now know of more than 4,700 extrasolar planets in nearly 3,500 different systems. None of this is really surprising. The conventional wisdom about how stars form suggests that a disk of debris — of planets and small bodies like asteroids and comets — should be commonplace, if not universal. It is comforting to know that thousands of stars relatively near us in the Milky Way have their own planetary systems. However, despite…