March 2026
Special Article
In 1995, Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz announced that they had discovered a planet orbiting another star, 51 Pegasi, like our own (1) – an epochal moment indeed in modern science. Since then, the number of ‘exoplanets’ has grown steadily. On 17 April 2014, the Kepler Space Telescope announced the discovery of the first Earth-like planet, Kepler-186f. (2) On 25 October 2021, The Extrasolar
Planets Encyclopaedia listed 4,846 planets distributed across 3,582 planetary systems. (3) With so many exoplanets already discovered in our Milky Way, some scientists extrapolate that the majority of stars in our galaxy – not to mention the universe – may have planets on which life may have evolved. As theologian Andrew Davison has observed, ‘this is evident in the shift in scientific studies in recent decades in the direction of thinking about the universe as a whole as a place where life can evolve and flourish.’ (4)