Searching for planets with life

Since 1995, when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Observatoire de Geneve, discovered the first planet orbiting another star like the Sun, over two hundred more extrasolar planets have been found in more than 170 solar systems outside our own.

On 25 April 25 1953, James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick published an historic paper in Nature that would change the fate of modern science.

In 2003, it was proposed at a conference of the world's leading experts in extrasolar (or 'exoplanet') detection that a new class of planets could be awaiting discovery: 'waterworlds'.

There are three main detection techniques that can be used to find extrasolar planets. All of them rely on detecting a planet's effect on its parent star, to infer the planet's existence.