On October 6, 1995, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz dropped a quiet bombshell at a Florence astrophysics conference: they had detected 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star. Located roughly 50 light-years away, this "Hot Jupiter" defied every prevailing planetary formation model by whipping around its host star in just four days, skimming blisteringly close to stellar hellfire. Before this detection via high-precision radial velocity measurements, our solar system was humanity's only architectural template for worlds. By proving that other suns harbored alien planets—and radically bizarre ones at that—the discovery transformed exoplanet hunting from fringe speculation into a core astronomical discipline. Today's catalog of thousands of alien worlds, parsed by orbital telescopes and machine learning pipelines, traces directly back to this single, paradigm-shattering wobble in starlight.