on good behavior and gentlemen’s agreements.”
Nothing, nothing at all, Bonfils insisted, had precipitated the preprint’s release in November 2011 after years of delay. It had been simpleserendipity. “It was slow,” he acknowledged. “I’m not proud of how long it took.” He offered his own view of what had motivated the fight over public HARPS data. “Before, it was Marcy, Butler, Vogt, Fischer. Now they have split, the group has almost evaporated. I don’t know Vogt or Butler personally, I have met Anglada once only. But I think there is, how to say, tension? You see it in their papers, in the language and accusations. A hunger, an aggression. I think it has become more difficult for them to get the observing time they need.”
For the time being, Anglada told me, he had no plans to stop examining the public HARPS data for new discoveries. “People seem to think GJ 667Cc was a one-off thing, or that I got lucky looking where I did, but that’s not true,” he said. “This is really just the beginning of a bigger story. When you improve precision as I have, more things appear. The population of exoplanets is growing exponentially as we become sensitive to lower masses. I’ve looked at hundreds of systems now in their database. A lot of objects are showing up.”
Despite working closely with Vogt and Butler, Laughlin had managed to stay above the battle for the first potentially habitable exoplanets. He had not been directly involved with the detections, announcements, and criticisms of Gliese 581g or GJ 667Cc, and he preferred to keep it that way. He held a longer view on the controversy surrounding them. In his mind, the strife between teams and the explosive expansion of exoplanetology were just growing pains, symptoms of a field struggling with its own imminent maturity.
“Just finding any planet around another star isn’t as newsworthy or appealing as it used to be,” Laughlin told me one afternoon in Santa Cruz. “That alone won’t get you a flashy press conference and the front pages of newspapers and lurid artist’s renditions like it would have ten, twenty years ago. Ten, twenty years from now, just finding an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star probably won’t be a big deal, either. Historians may look back and shake their heads at this period, when astronomers were regularly claiming to have foundthe ‘first habitable planet,’ but only in comparison to the last, previous ‘first habitable planet.’ It’s my sense they’ll remember this time as when the Heroic Age of extrasolar planet discovery came to a close.”
“The real story,” Marcy once remarked to me, “isn’t the validity or the timing of discovery of any particular Earth-size, Earth-mass planet. Simply detecting one of these things does not overturn astrophysics or planetary science. The real story here is the amazing plausibility of detecting them at all, the fact that from our perch upon this speck of dust, we have come to the point where we are on the threshold of these sorts of discoveries. It’s as surprising as an ant, living its life among other ants on an anthill, somehow calculating the size of the solar system. All we do is collect photons from the stars, and from that we can deduce the existence of planets and the scale and structure and future of the whole shooting match. It’s crazy.”
When, after repeated setbacks and delays, the APF at Lick Observatory finally became fully operational in 2013, observing time was evenly divided between the Marcy and Butler-Vogt teams. The break had been complete, and seemed irreversible: Butler and Marcy had not spoken since 2007, and perhaps never would again. And yet on nights when the sky above Mount Hamilton was dark and clear, they could be found virtually side by side, as their shared robotic telescope slewed between separate, distant points, building fractured empires among the stars.
The Worth of a World
B ack in 2009, less than a
Nothing, nothing at all, Bonfils insisted, had precipitated the preprint’s release in November 2011 after years of delay. It had been simpleserendipity. “It was slow,” he acknowledged. “I’m not proud of how long it took.” He offered his own view of what had motivated the fight over public HARPS data. “Before, it was Marcy, Butler, Vogt, Fischer. Now they have split, the group has almost evaporated. I don’t know Vogt or Butler personally, I have met Anglada once only. But I think there is, how to say, tension? You see it in their papers, in the language and accusations. A hunger, an aggression. I think it has become more difficult for them to get the observing time they need.”
For the time being, Anglada told me, he had no plans to stop examining the public HARPS data for new discoveries. “People seem to think GJ 667Cc was a one-off thing, or that I got lucky looking where I did, but that’s not true,” he said. “This is really just the beginning of a bigger story. When you improve precision as I have, more things appear. The population of exoplanets is growing exponentially as we become sensitive to lower masses. I’ve looked at hundreds of systems now in their database. A lot of objects are showing up.”
Despite working closely with Vogt and Butler, Laughlin had managed to stay above the battle for the first potentially habitable exoplanets. He had not been directly involved with the detections, announcements, and criticisms of Gliese 581g or GJ 667Cc, and he preferred to keep it that way. He held a longer view on the controversy surrounding them. In his mind, the strife between teams and the explosive expansion of exoplanetology were just growing pains, symptoms of a field struggling with its own imminent maturity.
“Just finding any planet around another star isn’t as newsworthy or appealing as it used to be,” Laughlin told me one afternoon in Santa Cruz. “That alone won’t get you a flashy press conference and the front pages of newspapers and lurid artist’s renditions like it would have ten, twenty years ago. Ten, twenty years from now, just finding an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star probably won’t be a big deal, either. Historians may look back and shake their heads at this period, when astronomers were regularly claiming to have foundthe ‘first habitable planet,’ but only in comparison to the last, previous ‘first habitable planet.’ It’s my sense they’ll remember this time as when the Heroic Age of extrasolar planet discovery came to a close.”
“The real story,” Marcy once remarked to me, “isn’t the validity or the timing of discovery of any particular Earth-size, Earth-mass planet. Simply detecting one of these things does not overturn astrophysics or planetary science. The real story here is the amazing plausibility of detecting them at all, the fact that from our perch upon this speck of dust, we have come to the point where we are on the threshold of these sorts of discoveries. It’s as surprising as an ant, living its life among other ants on an anthill, somehow calculating the size of the solar system. All we do is collect photons from the stars, and from that we can deduce the existence of planets and the scale and structure and future of the whole shooting match. It’s crazy.”
When, after repeated setbacks and delays, the APF at Lick Observatory finally became fully operational in 2013, observing time was evenly divided between the Marcy and Butler-Vogt teams. The break had been complete, and seemed irreversible: Butler and Marcy had not spoken since 2007, and perhaps never would again. And yet on nights when the sky above Mount Hamilton was dark and clear, they could be found virtually side by side, as their shared robotic telescope slewed between separate, distant points, building fractured empires among the stars.
The Worth of a World
B ack in 2009, less than a
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