There was a time not too many decades ago when an astronomer suggesting the existence of life-bearing planets beyond our solar system would be considered heresy, albeit without the punishment of house arrest suffered by Galileo until his death in 1642.
Fast forward to 2019, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, using HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, later formally named Dimidium. They would share the prize “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with James Peebles, Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton University.