No planets have been found outside our solar system
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtOther stars may have planets, but we have never detected one, and we may never be able to.
NowThe first planet confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, was announced in 1995. More than 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed since.
What actually happened
For most of the twentieth century, planets outside our solar system were a reasonable assumption with zero evidence. Textbooks were careful about this: other stars probably have planets, but detecting a faint planet next to a blindingly bright star is extraordinarily hard.
In 1992, Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail found planets orbiting a pulsar, an exotic and unexpected place to find them. Then in October 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced 51 Pegasi b, a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting an ordinary Sun-like star every four days. It won them a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. NASA's Kepler mission, launched in 2009, then turned exoplanets from rare finds into a census.
If you graduated before 1996, you left school in a universe where humanity knew of exactly one planetary system. That is no longer the universe you live in.
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Sources
- NASA Exoplanet Exploration: Discovery counts and historyscience.nasa.gov
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019nobelprize.org
Who was taught this
Still standard through 1997, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1995 learned the earlier version.