After decades of almost fruitless searches, 1995 heralded a newera for astronomy with the simultaneous discoveries of 51 Peg b(Mayor Queloz 1995), the first exoplanet orbiting a solartypestar, and of Gliese 229B (Oppenheimer et al. 1995), thefirst unambiguous brown dwarf to be detected directly. This occurredat a time when the scientific community was expectingthese discoveries (e.g. Stevenson 1991; Burrows et al. 1995)while having a lingering feeling that both planets and browndwarfs were rare, maybe extremely rare (e.g. Walker 1995).When 1995 struck, it demonstrated that these objects –althoughnot extremely frequent- could be found relatively easily withmodern instruments when one knew where and how to look forthem: in the case of (giant) planets, in orbit and possibly extremelyclose to solar-type stars; for brown dwarfs, in youngclusters, when they were still bright enough to be detectable (e.g.Rebolo et al. 1995). In parallel, observations of star-forming regionshad progressed so much that one could image young starswith circumstellar disks, soon to be assigned the adjective “protoplanetary”because planets were expected to form there (e.g.O’Dell Wen 1994). At last, astronomers had managed in onefell swoop to link stars, brown dwarfs, planets, and disks.
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