Some doubted the find, including astronomer Artie Hatzes of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, an early trailblazer in the exoplanet community who published a skeptical analysis. Wobbling stars have been used to infer hundreds of other planets-but larger ones. The star seemed to be moving back and forth about every three days, as if tugged by a small planet in orbit. The starlight shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, then the red, at regular intervals, indicating movement much as a siren rises and falls in pitch as it moves toward or away from a listener. But two years later, researchers failed to confirm Konacki's sighting, suggesting that his discovery was in fact a false alarm.ĭumusque originally found the Alpha Centauri planet by monitoring the light of the star Alpha Centauri B. The announcement sent ripples through the astronomical community: According to planet formation theories, the three stars' gravitational fields should have prevented such a large planet from forming at all. In 2005, Polish astronomer Maciej Konacki offered tantalizing evidence that HD 188753, a tightly packed three-star system, contained a gas planet similar to Jupiter. “We are not 100 percent sure, but probably the planet is not there.” How a Planet Vanishes “This is really good work,” said Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Distinguishing subtle clues from background noise is incredibly difficult, as shown in a new paper r ecently posted at and due to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Įven the team that originally reported the planet agrees. Now it will serve as a cautionary tale for planet hunters, a reminder that planets as small as Earth are hard to find. It would have been roughly a tenth the distance to its star that Mercury is to the sun, with a scorchingly hot surface probably covered in molten rock. This particular alien world wouldn't have been a good place to look for life, though. The discovery got people excited about finding neighboring worlds that might harbor life in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light-years away-already home to science fiction characters such as the Transformers and the creatures of Avatar. The planet, thought to be perhaps similar in mass to Earth, was hailed as a “landmark” when it was announced in 2012 in the journal Nature. According to a new study, Alpha Centauri Bb, a world in the nearest star system to us, was merely a ghost in the data.
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