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On Date of today (July 24) in 1991, the British physicist Andrew Lyne said he discovered the first planet outside our solar system – an overwhelming announcement after centuries of investigation into the mysterious depths of space. Lyne, researcher at the University of Manchester, and her colleagues had turned their attention to a pulsar, the rest of a huge dead star, which regularly explodes beams of radiation. After noticing strange changes in the moment of the pulses, the Lyne team suspected the gravitational attraction of an exoplanet could be the culprit. A new era of space exploration was born – or likewise, they thought.
The following winter, Lyne took over everything. A week before the January 1992 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Lyne realized that he and his co-authors had made a mistake, and he decided to admit the error of exoplanet to hundreds of his peers during the event. There, he explained to the crowd how he had not accurately explained the impact of the Elliptical Earth orbit on the pulse impulses. It biased the data and gave the illusion of a world that was not there. “The planet has just evaporated,” said Lyne in her speech, who received a standing ovation.
But the astronomy community did not have to wait a long time to learn the first real exoplanet – on times, in fact.
Just after Lyne reached her team’s error, the astronomer of the ARECIBO Observatory, Aleksander Wolszczan, went on stage. He and his co -author Dale Fraine, of the National Observatory of Astronomy Radio, had in fact maintained not one but two exoplanets of good faith – Poltergeist and Phobetor, using the same technique used by the Lyne team. Only the mathematics of Wolszczan and Fraine checked. Two years later, Wolszczan identified a third exoplanet, called Draugr, in orbit around this same pulsar, known as Lich.
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Wolszczan made major congratulations to Lyne, telling the astrophysicist Mario Livio that his article offered him a “baoster of trust” and assured him “that the signals of his data were real”.
It was “the most honorable thing I have ever seen,” the astrophysicist John Bahcall said at the time of journalist Michael D. Lemonick. “A good scientist is ruthlessly honest with himself, and that’s what you just saw.”
When you track down our universe and beyond, it turns out that false starts and escaped – as well as humility – are essential ingredients for new discoveries.
Image of lead: NASA / JPL-CALTECH
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