Word: butlers
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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...
Marcy and Butler's announcement could change the course of astronomy. "This is extraordinarily important," says astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "This is the first glimmering we have that normal solar systems exist beyond our own." It is sure to trigger a rush to find new planets. Indeed, half a dozen teams around the world are already looking. And in an address to the astronomers a few hours after Marcy's talk, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin announced a new program whose goal, he says, will be "not only detecting but taking direct images of Earthlike worlds...
...radio signal, the fastest known thing in the universe, would need 35 years to get there, and it would take another 35 for any aliens, should they exist, to answer. The planets are so dim that they cannot be detected directly. In fact, the only evidence Marcy and Butler have is observations of tiny wobbles in the positions of the two stars, caused by the planets' massive gravity. The intensity of the wobbles tells the astronomers how big each planet is, and the timing reveals how long it takes each to orbit its star...
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...