Word: butler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...inhospitable as both these worlds seem, their discovery, announced two weeks ago by San Francisco State University astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler, has thrown an almost wholly speculative area of study solidly into the realm of tangible fact. Despite years of searching with the most powerful telescopes, despite decades of listening for the faint crackle of radio signals from distant civilizations, despite endless theorizing about how life might or might not arise, nobody had ever found concrete evidence to suggest that our planet, our civilization, our life-forms were anything but unique in the cosmos...
...race to discover planets around sunlike stars proved similarly fruitless until about 18 months ago. At the time, Marcy and Butler were sure they had the inside track on finding them. The telescope they use, at Lick Observatory in the mountains above California's Silicon Valley, has an excellent view of the heavens. It also has one of the world's finest spectrometers. After a major refurbishment in November 1994, the device was even better. In principle, says Marcy, "we could detect not just Jupiters but Saturns...
...whole star were wobbling. Stars can also have huge blotches--sunspots, in essence--that change the mix of colors as they rotate into and out of view. And spectrometers are subject to all sorts of errors that come from changes in temperature and electronic glitches. Thus, Marcy and Butler had to run their observations through a sophisticated computer program they'd written to sort useful from useless information--a piece of software so complex and so demanding of computer time that their colleagues kidded them that it would never work...
They were wrong. As it happened, Butler was in the middle of rewriting the software last October to accommodate the spectrometer's newly heightened sensitivity when a disconcerting flood of E-mail started pouring in. Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, had just detected a planet circling the star 51 Pegasi, lying 45 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Says Queloz: "We first thought that our instrument was faulty, but repeated verifications and computations finally convinced us that we had bagged a planet...
That information, along with the laws of orbital mechanics and planetary formation, let Marcy and Butler paint a portrait of the new worlds. They're like Jupiter: mostly gas, with small cores of rock. If water exists on either, it's the temperature of hot tea and is located high in the atmosphere; creatures that live on the planets would be very different from anything on Earth. Says Marcy: "It would have to be some sort of life that evolved without ever touching the ground...