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Authors: Michael D. Lemonick
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discoveries.
In fact, the discoveries had already been made, even if Marcy and Butler didnât know it. The astronomers had been searching for wobbles for many months now, returning over and over to a list of 120 stars. But they hadnât bothered analyzing the data, since they thought no star would show a perceptible wobble over so short a time. The information was just sitting in storage on magnetic tapes. Now that they knew sucha thing was possible, however, they realized the signals of planets might be on those unread tapes. Butler was âinsane,â he later told me, to find out what was on them. He got his hands on some relatively fast computers and began feverishly processing data around the clock.
Within less than two months, Butler managed to tease out the signal of a planet orbiting the star 47 Ursae Majoris, in the Big Dipper. Then he found another, orbiting 70 Virginis, in the constellation Virgo. Neither of them was as crazy as 51 Peg b, as astronomers were now nicknaming it, but they were still closer to their stars than Jupiter is to the Sun. They were still a little crazy. 70 Virginis b, in particular, had an unusually eccentric, egg-shaped orbit. That was one of the strikes Dave Latham had listed against HD 114762.
Nevertheless, Geoff Marcy arranged to give a talk on their new planets at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was coming up in a few weeks. Unlike Michel Mayor a few months earlier, he and Paul Butler didnât have a paper ready for publication, so they werenât bound to avoid reporters. They gave a heads-up to the societyâs press officer, an astronomer named Steve Maran, who immediately scheduled a press conference. He wouldnât say in advance what it would be about, although he told me privately, and undoubtedly told other reporters as well, that Iâd be crazy to miss it.
Despite the veil of secrecy, however, word got out that Marcy would have something important to say, and when he finally did, he spoke with a theatrical flair that I would later recognize to be his trademark. âAfter the discovery of 51Pegasi b,â he said, âeveryone wondered if it was a one-in-a-million observation. The answer is ⦠no. Planets arenât rare after all.â He went on to describe 47 UMa b and 70 Vir b. He also pointed out that the latter orbited in the habitable zone of its star, the region where water could exist in liquid form, the necessary ingredient for life. And while 70 Vir b itself was too big to support living beings (itâs about six times as massive as Jupiter), it might have habitable moons. This was pure speculation, but it was a bold enough statement to get the discovery on the cover of
Time
and into headlines and news broadcasts around the world.
What all those viewers and readers didnât realize was that Marcy and Butlerâs announcement marked an enormous change in the way scientists would think about extraterrestrial life from that moment forward. For about two thousand years, philosophers and scientists had actively debated the question of whether life exists beyond the Earth. From the Renaissance on, it was widely believed that the answer was yes. But since the early 1900s, when astronomer Percival Lowell convinced himself that he could see canals and other evidence of life on Mars, thinking about and looking for life on other planets had been considered something of a fringe idea in science. The UFO craze that started in the 1950s didnât help.
In principle, scientists thought it was plausible that life existed elsewhere in the universe, and a few even tried looking for itâFrank Drake, who began the formal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1961, for example, and a few NASA scientists who designed biology-sensing experiments for the Viking Mars landers in the 1970s. But no one even knew forsure that there were any planets beyond the solar system for life to exist on, and it was
In fact, the discoveries had already been made, even if Marcy and Butler didnât know it. The astronomers had been searching for wobbles for many months now, returning over and over to a list of 120 stars. But they hadnât bothered analyzing the data, since they thought no star would show a perceptible wobble over so short a time. The information was just sitting in storage on magnetic tapes. Now that they knew sucha thing was possible, however, they realized the signals of planets might be on those unread tapes. Butler was âinsane,â he later told me, to find out what was on them. He got his hands on some relatively fast computers and began feverishly processing data around the clock.
Within less than two months, Butler managed to tease out the signal of a planet orbiting the star 47 Ursae Majoris, in the Big Dipper. Then he found another, orbiting 70 Virginis, in the constellation Virgo. Neither of them was as crazy as 51 Peg b, as astronomers were now nicknaming it, but they were still closer to their stars than Jupiter is to the Sun. They were still a little crazy. 70 Virginis b, in particular, had an unusually eccentric, egg-shaped orbit. That was one of the strikes Dave Latham had listed against HD 114762.
Nevertheless, Geoff Marcy arranged to give a talk on their new planets at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was coming up in a few weeks. Unlike Michel Mayor a few months earlier, he and Paul Butler didnât have a paper ready for publication, so they werenât bound to avoid reporters. They gave a heads-up to the societyâs press officer, an astronomer named Steve Maran, who immediately scheduled a press conference. He wouldnât say in advance what it would be about, although he told me privately, and undoubtedly told other reporters as well, that Iâd be crazy to miss it.
Despite the veil of secrecy, however, word got out that Marcy would have something important to say, and when he finally did, he spoke with a theatrical flair that I would later recognize to be his trademark. âAfter the discovery of 51Pegasi b,â he said, âeveryone wondered if it was a one-in-a-million observation. The answer is ⦠no. Planets arenât rare after all.â He went on to describe 47 UMa b and 70 Vir b. He also pointed out that the latter orbited in the habitable zone of its star, the region where water could exist in liquid form, the necessary ingredient for life. And while 70 Vir b itself was too big to support living beings (itâs about six times as massive as Jupiter), it might have habitable moons. This was pure speculation, but it was a bold enough statement to get the discovery on the cover of
Time
and into headlines and news broadcasts around the world.
What all those viewers and readers didnât realize was that Marcy and Butlerâs announcement marked an enormous change in the way scientists would think about extraterrestrial life from that moment forward. For about two thousand years, philosophers and scientists had actively debated the question of whether life exists beyond the Earth. From the Renaissance on, it was widely believed that the answer was yes. But since the early 1900s, when astronomer Percival Lowell convinced himself that he could see canals and other evidence of life on Mars, thinking about and looking for life on other planets had been considered something of a fringe idea in science. The UFO craze that started in the 1950s didnât help.
In principle, scientists thought it was plausible that life existed elsewhere in the universe, and a few even tried looking for itâFrank Drake, who began the formal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1961, for example, and a few NASA scientists who designed biology-sensing experiments for the Viking Mars landers in the 1970s. But no one even knew forsure that there were any planets beyond the solar system for life to exist on, and it was
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