Facts of the Matter: Exoplanets come to light with help of modern tools

For centuries astronomers speculated about whether stars other than our sun had planetary systems. The answer to that question came in 1995 with the first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star approximately 50 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
As of Oct. 1 the Kepler space telescope and other observatories have discovered 3,851 confirmed planets in 2,871 systems, with 636 systems having more than one planet. The nearest is a mere 4.2 light-years distant.
In Aug