"So many Suns, so many Earths"

NEW TECHNIQUES CONFIRM OLD SPECULATIONS: "SO MANY SUNS, SO MANY EARTHS"

* Los 560 planetas conocidos

Formerly the planets were points in the sky. As time passed, however, those lights in the sky began to be treated, at least in elite intellectual circles, as objects, and finally as places. This revolution came, in large measure, with the invention of the telescope. Beyond the short human senses hid many worlds to be discovered.

Since the days of Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 310 - ca. 230 B. C. E.) there were suspicions that the Sun and stars had something in common. One of the first to clearly say that the Sun ought to be a star, so close that its light dazzles us and heats the ground in which we step on, was Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695).

Consequently, the other stars are suns, just that they are too distant so we perceive them as mere dots in the sky. But if we travel to them, we would see them as big and hot as our Sun, and the Sun, so small and distant as any other star. Thus Huygens dared to predict that there should be other planetary systems. In his posthumous book “Cosmospheres” (Adriaan Moetjens publishing house, The Hague, 1698, and Timothy Childe Publishing, London, 1698) he allowed his thought flow further: “What a wonderful and amazing Scheme we have here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and each endowed with many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorned with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our astonishment and admiration might be increased when we consider the prodigious distances and a multitude of Stars?”

 FIRST ATTEMPTS

 Even after the discovery of more planets in our own Solar System (Uranus by William Herschel in 1781, and Neptune by John Couch Adams and Urban Le Verrier in 1846) and new categories of objects (asteroids, by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801, and the today-called trans-Neptunian objects, by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930), there were few who dared to search for planets around distant stars. If the light from the star itself comes so weakened after much travel, imagine the dim light reflected by extrasolar planets.

One of the first to try, however, was Piet van de Kamp. This professor at Swarthmore College, working from the Sproul Observatory, in the United States, proposed to himself, starting in 1937, to examine the nearest stars, including the one called Barnard’s star. His technique was to photograph each star and carefully measure its position relative to other stars. He hoped that if an object was orbiting, for example, Barnard’s star, the tug that gravity generates between them (and that is the reason why the planets are kept revolving around a central star) would leave some “trail”, in the form of a slight swaying of the star under study. It is similar to that swinging seen in a small tree when someone grabs her or himself to its flexible trunk and begins to circle it childishly, hanging from the plant while doing so.

After decades of observation and thousands of photographs, van de Kamp triumphantly announced in 1963 that he had detected the gravitational tug of an object, about 11 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting Barnard’s star.

However, in Science there is something important called reproducibility: it is not enough that someone observe something once, anyone should be able to get the result by her or himself if she or he repeat the observing by her or his own means. And while the photographs of van de Kamp were there, no one could see the same phenomenon with other telescopes.

After careful analysis of the case, it was concluded that unfortunately what was happening was due to a defect in the telescope of van de Kamp. He had not discovered any extrasolar planet.

MODERN TECHNIQUES

With the development of electronics, however, there were people who felt that with new ultra-sensitive instruments they could detect the swinging that Van de Kamp sought so much among the stars.

In 1992 there was an indication that there could be worlds as imagined by Huygens and many others, when Aleksander Volscian and Dale Frail announced that something was interfering with the rotation of a dead star called PRS B1257 +12, a neutron star.

Using the Arecibo Radio Telescope, in this case they detected a slowing in its rotation, measured by the frequency of the natural radio waves emitted by the star, that supposedly must be extremely regular, synchronized with its rotation speed. The phenomenon of the slowing of the rotation is known, as is the case with Earth because it is piggybacking the Moon. The day is becoming slightly longer over the millions of years. The same thing was happening to PRS B1257 +12, by piggybacking, they calculated, objects the size of Earth. However, there was no other indication, let alone pictures.

In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz had ready at the Observatories de Haute-Provence, France, a high-definition spectrometer for measuring fluctuations in the radial velocity of stars. This complicated phrase means they had built a very sensitive instrument to analyze carefully the color of the stars. It is known that when a star (or any object) is moving towards us, becomes slightly bluer (or less red). When it is receding away, however, becomes slightly more red (or less bluish). This is due to the Doppler effect, well known in the case of sound: the pitch of an approaching vehicle becomes higher, but when it recedes becomes lower. The same applies to light, however here the effect is imperceptible to the naked eye, although it can be noted with instruments. The new device, attached to a telescope of 1,93 m in diameter, was so precise that could measure fluctuations in velocity of just 40 km/h.

Armed with this, Mayor and Queloz were able to detect fluctuations in the star 51 Pegasi, because it actually had another object in tow. It was estimated that the companion was about 10 times the size of Jupiter, insufficiently big to be another star (such as small dark stars called brown dwarfs), so it is considered to be a planet. What was remarkable about this discovery was that now the star is one of the so-called main sequence stars, i.e. that shares certain characteristics with our Sun.

This discovery, which eventually made them win the Nobel Prize in Physics, was followed by others, most of them by the team of Paul Butler and Geoffrey Marcy, who were also pioneers of the technique of radial-velocity perturbation.

NOTABLE EXTRASOLAR PLANETS

In 1999 the discovery of the first planetary system around another star was published. It is the Upsilon Andromeda system, with three planets with masses comparable to Jupiter’s.

That same year, a significant event was the detection of the passage, or transit of an extrasolar planet, HD 209458 b, in front of its star. By the decrease in brightness of the latter (in fact, an eclipse) the diameter of the planet could be calculated, discovering that is about 15 times larger than the Earth.

The same transit method also allowed to detect, in 2001, a slight variation in the color of the star during the eclipse, indicating that the planet has a gaseous envelope, that is, an atmosphere. With the Hubble Space Telescope sodium was detected. Later, between 2003 and 2004 hydrogen, carbon and oxygen were detected. Then in 2005, with the Spitzer Space Telescope, observing in infrared, its light could be directly detected, its temperature being calculated at about 1500 kelvins (above and beyond 1000 degrees C). In 2007, what probably are silicate dust clouds were found.

The first exoplanet directly photographed is 2M1207 b, confirmed by the European Very Large Telescope from the Atacama desert in 2005. It has 5 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits around a brown dwarf star, 230 light-years from us.

Meanwhile, data from the Spitzer Telescope showed that the light coming from the planet HD 189733 b has the characteristics of being reflected by water vapor molecules. And in December 2008 methane was detected in that world, an organic compound. In November 2009 a similar discovery was announced for HD 209458 b.

Also in 2008 it was discovered that the star HD 40307 has a planetary system with three planets of sizes comparable to Earth’s.

The smallest extrasolar planet in diameter detected as of 2022 is Kepler-37 b, which is 3 times smaller than the Earth. The least massive is PSR B1257+12 b, comparable to the Moon.

The hottest exoplanet discovered so far is KELT-9 b, about 12 times hotter than the Earth, and the coldest is OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b, 6 times colder than the Earth.

The exoplanet with the shortest orbital period around a normally evolving star, in this case, around a red dwarf star, is K2-137 b, with a sidereal year of just 4 hours and 19 minutes.

The first confirmed exoplanet that orbits a binary star is Kepler-16 b. This arrangement makes this planet have two suns.

The most distant exoplanets discovered as of 2025 are SWEEPS-4 and SWEEPS-11, at 27 710 light-years away, and the closest are the system of Proxima Centauri b and d, at 4 light-years away from the Solar System.

In 2005 it was reported that, by using the giant Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama desert of Chile, one of these subtle points in space was directly photographed for the first time in History. It was the case of 2M1207 b, a planet orbiting a brown dwarf star located at 170 light-years from the Solar System.

In 2015 it was announced the discovery of a planet similar in size to the Earth orbiting a G2-type star, the same type of the Sun, and at about the same distance, with an orbital period of 385 days versus 365 days for the Earth, right in the “habitable zone”.

Thus today Homo sapiens have on record much more planets outside the Solar System than within it, being discovered at the fantastic pace of hundreds every year. With newer data collected from equipment like the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in March 2009, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in April 2018, and others, it is expected to find planets, one after another, more and more like the Earth.

Aldo Loup.

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Originally published in ABC Color, on 1 February 2010. Photograph: This image obtained with the adaptive optics system of the Keck II telescope, one of the largest in the world, by the NIRC2 camera, in near-infrared light, displays four planets orbiting a star 133 light-years away from us. The planets’ star, called HR 8799, is the central blob. The four planets, called HR 8799 b, HR 8799 c, HR 8799 d and HR 8799 e, are probably gas giants like Jupiter. Planet b is about 6 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at about 72 astronomical units (AU, the distance between Earth and the Sun) of the central star. The planets c, d and e are about 8, 9 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter and orbit at about 41, 27 and 16 AU, respectively. For an idea of scale, Jupiter resides at about 5 times the Earth-Sun distance, and of course Earth 1 time, or 1 AU. Photograph credit: National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, Christian Marois & W. M. Keck Observatory.  With permission from the authors.