absurd ten times closer than Mercury hugs the Sun.
Not only that, but based on how hard it was yanking on the star, this was no brown dwarf: It was only half as massive as Jupiter. Mayorâs spectrograph wasnât sensitive enough to find a Jupiter in a Jupiter-like orbit, but something this close in had a huge amount of leverage on the star. It looked just the way a giant planet should lookâif a planet could exist in this location. Theorists said it couldnât. But as Tsevi Mazeh had said ten years earlier, âmaybe the theorists are wrong.â
In fact, not all theorists had said such a close-in planet couldnât exist. Douglas Lin, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, had proposed back in 1992 that giant planets might migrate inward from where they originally formed. He figured theyâd just spiral all the way into the star and be destroyedâbut for a while, they could take up an orbit like the one Mayor was describing. And forty years before that, the legendary theorist Otto Struve had written a paper for the October 1952 issue of a journal called
The Observatory
titled âProposal for a Project of High-precision Stellar Radial Velocity Work,â in which he foreshadowed not only Mayorâs and Marcyâs and Dave Lathamâs work, but Bill Boruckiâs as well. In part, Struve wrote:
We know that
stellar
companions can exist at very small distances. It is not unreasonable that a planet might exist at a distance of 1/50 astronomical unit, or about 3,000,000 km. Its period around a star of solar mass would then be about 1 day. If the mass of this planet were equal to that of Jupiter ⦠[it] might be just detectable ⦠There would, of course, also be eclipses ⦠This, too, should be ascertainable by modern photoelectric methods.
Struveâs idea had been largely forgotten, however, and Linâs work was considered highly speculative. If an observer is wrong as much as 10 percent of the time, goes the astronomical rule of thumb, he or she is a pretty careless observer. But if a theorist is wrong as little as 10 percent of the time, he or she isnât taking enough creative risks. Lin was, and remains, a very good, creative theorist, so his colleagues took his predictions with a grain of salt.
Mayor and Queloz returned to the telescope, trying to make absolutely certain that they werenât somehow kidding themselves. Maybe the star was pulsing, its outer atmosphere bulging toward and then away from Earth in a four-day rhythm. Maybe the star wasnât perfectly spherical, and they were seeing the bulgy part moving toward them and then away. âThe first principle [of science],â the physicist Richard Feynman said in a commencement talk at Caltech in 1974, âis that you must not fool yourselfâand you are the easiest person to fool.â Peter van de Kamp had fooled himself with his âdiscoveryâ of a planet orbiting Barnardâs Star (he fooled others as well; Otto Struveâs 1952 paper refers to âresultsannounced ⦠by P. Van de Kampâ). Mayor and Queloz, like Marcy and Butler half a world away, were determined to avoid destroying their reputations. But hard as they tried to make the impossible conclusion go away, it refused.
In the end, Mayor told me on Capri, âItâs a difficult thing to decide youâve done all you can, that youâre ready to leave your office and go public.â They submitted a paper to the journal
Nature
claiming the discovery of a planet-like object they called 51 Pegasi b (the
b
meaning that it is a secondary object orbiting the star 51 Pegasi). Before the paper could be published, he spoke about the discovery at a conference in Florence, Italy, in October 1995. According to
Nature
âs strict rules, he was allowed to do this, but he wasnât allowed to discuss the findings with reporters until the paper was actually published. If he did so
Not only that, but based on how hard it was yanking on the star, this was no brown dwarf: It was only half as massive as Jupiter. Mayorâs spectrograph wasnât sensitive enough to find a Jupiter in a Jupiter-like orbit, but something this close in had a huge amount of leverage on the star. It looked just the way a giant planet should lookâif a planet could exist in this location. Theorists said it couldnât. But as Tsevi Mazeh had said ten years earlier, âmaybe the theorists are wrong.â
In fact, not all theorists had said such a close-in planet couldnât exist. Douglas Lin, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, had proposed back in 1992 that giant planets might migrate inward from where they originally formed. He figured theyâd just spiral all the way into the star and be destroyedâbut for a while, they could take up an orbit like the one Mayor was describing. And forty years before that, the legendary theorist Otto Struve had written a paper for the October 1952 issue of a journal called
The Observatory
titled âProposal for a Project of High-precision Stellar Radial Velocity Work,â in which he foreshadowed not only Mayorâs and Marcyâs and Dave Lathamâs work, but Bill Boruckiâs as well. In part, Struve wrote:
We know that
stellar
companions can exist at very small distances. It is not unreasonable that a planet might exist at a distance of 1/50 astronomical unit, or about 3,000,000 km. Its period around a star of solar mass would then be about 1 day. If the mass of this planet were equal to that of Jupiter ⦠[it] might be just detectable ⦠There would, of course, also be eclipses ⦠This, too, should be ascertainable by modern photoelectric methods.
Struveâs idea had been largely forgotten, however, and Linâs work was considered highly speculative. If an observer is wrong as much as 10 percent of the time, goes the astronomical rule of thumb, he or she is a pretty careless observer. But if a theorist is wrong as little as 10 percent of the time, he or she isnât taking enough creative risks. Lin was, and remains, a very good, creative theorist, so his colleagues took his predictions with a grain of salt.
Mayor and Queloz returned to the telescope, trying to make absolutely certain that they werenât somehow kidding themselves. Maybe the star was pulsing, its outer atmosphere bulging toward and then away from Earth in a four-day rhythm. Maybe the star wasnât perfectly spherical, and they were seeing the bulgy part moving toward them and then away. âThe first principle [of science],â the physicist Richard Feynman said in a commencement talk at Caltech in 1974, âis that you must not fool yourselfâand you are the easiest person to fool.â Peter van de Kamp had fooled himself with his âdiscoveryâ of a planet orbiting Barnardâs Star (he fooled others as well; Otto Struveâs 1952 paper refers to âresultsannounced ⦠by P. Van de Kampâ). Mayor and Queloz, like Marcy and Butler half a world away, were determined to avoid destroying their reputations. But hard as they tried to make the impossible conclusion go away, it refused.
In the end, Mayor told me on Capri, âItâs a difficult thing to decide youâve done all you can, that youâre ready to leave your office and go public.â They submitted a paper to the journal
Nature
claiming the discovery of a planet-like object they called 51 Pegasi b (the
b
meaning that it is a secondary object orbiting the star 51 Pegasi). Before the paper could be published, he spoke about the discovery at a conference in Florence, Italy, in October 1995. According to
Nature
âs strict rules, he was allowed to do this, but he wasnât allowed to discuss the findings with reporters until the paper was actually published. If he did so
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