Astronomer Rory Barnes at the University of Arizona has become the first to find a planet outside our solar system by predicting its location in advance.
That hasn’t happened since astronomers found Neptune in our own solar system in the year 1846
Astronomer Rory Barnes at the University of Arizona has become the first to find a planet outside our solar system by predicting its location in advance.
That hasn’t happened since astronomers found Neptune in our own solar system in the year 1846. Barnes said more planets will be found orbiting distant stars as long as there’s room for them to form.
Rory Barnes: The idea is when you start predicting where planets are, you start to understand how they formed. And, when we start trying to think about how are we going to find planets around other stars – hopefully planets with life – we need some sort of concept of how they got there, so that we know where to look.
Barnes had noticed that planets are packed together as closely as possible without destabilizing their orbits.
Rory Barnes: They behave similar to our own solar system. That is to say, that our system teeters on this edge of instability – well, so do these other ones. So we’re seeing commonalities between our system and others.
He looked at a system called HD 74156, which seemed to have a large gap between two known planets. Barnes predicted a planet there. Other astronomers later found it. Barnes said he believes many stars have their own planets.
Rory Barnes: There is another system we’ve already predicted. We need to find that this planet is in that system, and hopefully they’ll be finding it soon. I know a lot of people are now going to start really looking hard for it.
Our thanks to:
Lunar and Planetary Lab
University of Arizona
Learning to love science. As a producer for EarthSky, Lindsay Patterson interviews some of the world's most fascinating scientists. Through EarthSky, her work content is syndicated on some of the world's top media websites, including USAToday.com and Reuters.com. Patterson is also charged with helping to stay in steady communication with the tho