While I had heard about the discovery of the first planets beyond our solar system I hadn’t really been keeping up with the news of such discoveries, despite the fact that I do really like my science fiction. Sure, there are planets orbiting stars that aren’t our sun, but considering the distance that one has to travel to actually get to the closest one I didn’t see much point in paying huge amounts of attention (but then again that was back before the internet where most of our news came either through the television or the newspaper and if we wanted to find out more we have to go to dedicated scientific journals).