Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [106]
This can be hard on even the most brilliant scientists. As they practice their craft, they are forced to renounce some of their beliefs, no matter how deeply held they might be. If they err—as they almost certainly will—they must admit that they have deceived themselves. They have to do it publicly and without regard for their fragile human egos. They must eviscerate themselves on the altar of science. At least, that’s what their peers expect.
For Andrew Lyne, an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, the day of reckoning came in January 1992. Standing in front of a roomful of physicists and astronomers, Lyne was steeling himself, preparing to make an announcement that could destroy him. “It was the thing that one fears more than anything else in one’s scientific life, and it was happening,” Lyne said. “I certainly at the time thought that it was the end of my career.”
Lyne was a radio astronomer, an expert in detecting and interpreting radio waves spewed out by stars and galaxies. In the early 1990s, his attention was drawn to a collapsed star known as a pulsar. These pulsars shine like cosmic lighthouses, emitting beams of radio waves as they spin. An earthbound observer like Lyne sees these pulsars blinking on and off with a clocklike regularity. But Lyne noticed that one pulsar was not blinking quite so regularly; it seemed to speed up and slow down. It was almost as if the pulsar was being tugged about by an unseen object, an invisible massive body orbiting the pulsar and pulling it out of its regular rhythm. He and his team had spotted what appeared to be a planet circling a foreign star.
Lyne was ecstatic. It would be the first detection of a world outside our solar system, a truly alien planet. It was something that astronomers had been looking for, in vain, for decades. This discovery would inscribe Lyne’s name among the immortals of astronomy. Barely able to contain his excitement, Lyne submitted a paper to Nature.
The manuscript contained at least one significant issue. The planet seemed to orbit the pulsar once every 365 days, the same amount of time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. It would be a pretty stunning coincidence if true, and to some astronomers it suggested something was wrong with Lyne’s measurements. Perhaps he was failing to take the Earth’s motion around the sun into account. It was a big warning sign, but Lyne was confident about his observations. “We did all sorts of tests on the data and tried to think of all the possible ways we might be making a mistake.” They couldn’t find an error. They were truly convinced: they were seeing an extrasolar planet. The reviewers at Nature were apparently convinced, too. It seemed to be a momentous discovery.
When the Nature paper came out, the astronomical community went wild. Lyne was showered with congratulations. The president of the American Astronomical Society immediately called a special session at the society’s annual meeting to discuss the discovery. Lyne would be the guest of honor. Then disaster struck. “Ten or twelve days before I was due to give that talk, I discovered the error,” Lyne said. It was a subtle one. His team had used the wrong piece of software to correct for the Earth’s motion. With one of the dozens of pulsars they had been observing, they forgot to make a key change in the computer code. This minute error manifested as a tiny glitch in the pulsar’s timing,