Word: butlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
More than one astronomical discovery has disappeared on a closer look, though, so Marcy and Butler headed for the telescope, determined either to debunk or verify the Swiss team's claims. Sure enough, says Marcy, after four nights at Lick and many hours of computer time, "everything they'd said about the planet was confirmed." (Butler and Marcy did, however, show that hints the Swiss team had found a second planet around the same star were mistaken...
Marcy didn't rest on his euphoria. He and Butler went into high gear, determined to be at least the second team to find planets around a sunlike star. They begged telescope time from their colleagues and borrowed more than $100,000 worth of computer equipment to crunch gigabytes' worth of data from observations stretching back over eight years. "We knew," says Butler, "that we could get scooped again and again by the Swiss team...
After two months, they had analyzed 60 of the 120 stars in their survey. On the morning of Dec. 30, Butler went to the office to check on the computer's progress. "When I saw the data come up, I was completely blown away," he says. It was the telltale signature of the object orbiting around 70 Virginis. Recalls Butler: "It knocked me off the chair." His colleagues at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, where Marcy and Butler announced their findings two weeks ago, were no less excited. "What we are seeing," said Robert...