The discovery of the "hot Jupiter" exoplanet 51 Pegasi b on Oct. 6, 1995 changed the course of astronomical history.
The Copernican Principle, named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus (who proposed the heliocentric model of the Universe), states that Earth and humans do not occupy a special or privileged place in the Universe. In cosmological terms, this essentially means that Earth is representative of the norm, and life is likely to exist throughout the cosmos. While our efforts to find extraterrestrial life, a field of study known as astrobiology, have yielded no results so far, these efforts have been limited in scope. As a result, scientists are forced to speculate based on the only planet known to support life—i.e., Earth.
