Astronomer David Gray is admitting he was wrong.
"I'm disappointed, but the truth is the truth," Gray says now as the journal Nature prints a paper in which he recants his previous suggestion that the first widely accepted sighting of a planet going around an Earth-type star was in error.Last year, the University of Western Ontario astronomer stirred the astronomical community when he argued that periodic changes in the light coming from the star 51 Pegasi was not evidence that gravity from a giant planet was causing the star to wobble.
Rather, Gray and co-author Artie Hatzes of the University of Texas at Austin presented data that seemed to show that natural pulsations in the stellar surface were causing the twinkling in the star, located about 45 light-years from Earth.
This interpretation challenged the veracity of not only 51 Pegasi's putative solar system but five other similar sightings that suggested large planets were circling close to other stars.
There is only "one chance in about 300 of this occurring by (planetary) chance," their original paper said about the changes in brightness that the two astronomers observed. It added: "The chance of their being caused by a planet is vanishingly small."
Gray and Hatzes, in two different papers in Nature, now present a more complete analysis that apparently shows that what they in fact had observed was the 1-in-300 natural-chance occurrence. "The image (in the previous data) was just noise," Gray said in a telephone interview.
The recanting of the two men's alternative thesis means astronomers can feel confident that they have evidence for - if not physical sightings of - giant planets circling eight stars.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service