Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The quest begins
- 2 Infinity and beyond
- 3 New arrivals in the Solar System
- 4 Why stars wobble
- 5 Neutron planets
- 6 Brown dwarfs in the headlines
- 7 Sirens in the Cosmos
- 8 Foreign planets different to our home-grown ones
- 9 Destination: earths!
- 10 Further yet: life
- Appendix. Properties of the exoplanets
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Plate section
7 - Sirens in the Cosmos
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The quest begins
- 2 Infinity and beyond
- 3 New arrivals in the Solar System
- 4 Why stars wobble
- 5 Neutron planets
- 6 Brown dwarfs in the headlines
- 7 Sirens in the Cosmos
- 8 Foreign planets different to our home-grown ones
- 9 Destination: earths!
- 10 Further yet: life
- Appendix. Properties of the exoplanets
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Plate section
Summary
On the morning of 5 August 1988, the readers of the daily, Libération, read on page 19 a headline which was intriguing, to say the least: ‘They see planets everywhere’. This was intriguing and somewhat enigmatic. You had to read the introduction to better understand: ‘Two astronomers, a Canadian and an American, claimed the day before yesterday to have discovered new solar systems. Shivers. And doubts.’
Baltimore is in the American state of Maryland and is home to the Space Telescope Institute, the control centre of the brand new Hubble Space Telescope. In August 1988, the town welcomed the twentieth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union for several days. Nearly 2000 astronomers were expected from 54 different countries. This was the moment that two teams of researchers chose to announce their discoveries. On the one hand, there were the Canadians Bruce Campbell and Gordon Walker, from the University of Victoria (British Columbia), and on the other, a team led by David Latham, the American from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Campbell and Walker had followed about twenty nearby stars, looking for substellar mass companions: brown dwarfs, of course, but also hopefully giant planets. Their quest seemed to have succeeded. Nine of their stars showed behaviour that could well have been due to such companions. According to the two researchers, it was very unlikely that the objects were brown dwarfs, because, they argued, if they were brown dwarfs, then they would have been detected by astrometrical techniques.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Worlds in the CosmosThe Discovery of Exoplanets, pp. 134 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003