War of The Worlds

ESO/L. Calcada

No one knows what the planet Gliese 667Cc looks like. We know that it is about 22 light-years from Earth, a journey of lifetimes upon lifetimes. But no one can say whether it is a world like ours, with oceans and life, cities and single-malt Scotch. Only a hint of a to-and-fro oscillation in the star it orbits, detectable by Earth's most sensitive telescopes and spectrographs, lets astronomers say the planet exists at all. The planet is bigger than our world, perhaps made of rocks instead of gas, and within its star's “habitable zone”—at a Goldilocks distance that ensures enough starlight to make liquid water possible but not so much as to nuke the planet clean.

That's enough to fill the scientists who hunt for worlds outside our own solar system—so-called exoplanets—with wonder. Gliese 667Cc is, if not a sibling to our world, at least a cousin out there amid the stars. No one knows if it is a place we humans could someday live, breathe, and watch triple sunsets. No one knows whether barely imagined natives are right now pointing their most sensitive and far-seeing technology at Earth, wondering the same things. Yet regardless, to be the person who found Gliese 667Cc is to be the person who changes the quest for life beyond our world, to be remembered as long as humans exist to remember—by the light of the sun or a distant, unknown star.

Which is a problem. Because another thing no one knows about Gliese 667Cc is who should get credit for discovering it.

Gliese 667Cc is at the center of an epic controversy in astronomy—a fight over the validity of data, the nature of scientific discovery, and the ever-important question of who got there first.

In late 1995 Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor and his student Didier Queloz found 51 Pegasi b, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. It was orbiting far too close to its sun to allow the formation of water, but the discovery made Mayor's European team world famous anyway.

Soon, though, they lost their lead in the planet-hunting race to a pair of American researchers, Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler. The two men had been looking for exoplanets for almost a decade; they bagged their first two worlds a couple of months after Mayor's announcement.

The two teams evolved into fiercely competitive dynasties, fighting to have the most—and most tantalizing—worlds to their names. Their rivalry was good for science; within a decade, each had found on the order of a hundred planets around a wide variety of stars. Soon the hunt narrowed to a bigger prize. The teams went searching for smaller, rocky planets they could crown “Earth-like.”

Stellar Wobble The Spectral fluctuations of a star with an exoplanet create a sine wave.

Most planet hunters aren't looking for exoplanets, per se. Those worlds are too small and dim to easily see. They're looking instead for telltale shifts in the light of a star, “wobbles” in its spectral identity caused by the gravitational pull of an unseen orbiting exoplanet. When that force tugs a star toward Earth, the Doppler effect ever so slightly compresses the waves of light it emits, shifting them toward the blue end of the spectrum. When the star moves away from Earth, its waves of starlight stretch to reach us, shifting toward the red. You can't see those shifts with the naked eye. Only a spectrograph can, and the more stable and precise it is, the smaller the wobbles—and planets—you can find.

By late 2003 the European team had a very precise instrument, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or Harps. Mounted to a 3.6-meter telescope on a mountaintop in Chile, Harps could detect wobbles of less than a meter per second. (Earth moves the sun just a tenth that amount.) The Americans had to make do with an older instrument called the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer, or Hires—less precise but paired with a more powerful telescope.