Famous First Words #8: The First Extrasolar Planet -- Wolszczan and Frail

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

It's tough being an astrophysicist. While in the popular mind, the exploration of new life and new civilizations is some Iowa farm boy chasing alien tail, your version of extraterrestrial affairs consists of combing through 40 years of stellar interferometry data looking for periodic Doppler shifts. For Cat's sake, man: Where are the space babes? That's all people want to know. This is perhaps the greatest hurdle in encouraging our jaded youth to take an interest in science.

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So there was much excitement in nerd circles when Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced their discovery of the first extrasolar planet. Sure, we had been looking at alien suns since time immemorial; all you have to do is go outside at night and look up. Alien planets were a tougher nut to crack. You couldn't just point a telescope at them, not even the vaunted Hubbel. So astrophysics wonks came up with the clever idea to instead look for signature planetary effects on the local star, such as a wobble or a periodic change in brightness. It was the breakthrough we needed. To-date, we have catalogued hundreds of worlds orbiting other suns. Next up: the search for Earth-like worlds. Only then will we be able to confirm the existence of T'Pring, Drusillia, Kanutu Nona, or the Eymorg Queen Kara.

Here begins our first step towards finding some other world we can exploit and enslave: Wolszczan and Frall"s announcement of the first extrasolar planet -- two of them to be precise (probably gas giants) -- orbiting the pulsar PSR1257+12:

A planetary system around the millisecond pulsar PSR1257+12
A. Wolszczan and D. Frail
Nature 355:145 (1992)

Millisecond radio pulsars, which are old (109yr), rapidly rotating neutron stars believed to be spun up by accretion of matter from their stellar companions, are usually found in binary systems with other degenerate stars.

LabKitty will go on record as predicting that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe will look like us. No, not because of any religious or mystical conviction. Rather, because a tetrapodal, bipedal, big-brained omnivore with well-developed binocular vision, complex vocalization, and manual dexterity is a superb design. Not convinced? Go ask the #2 species in any ecosystem on Earth how their fight against the hu-mans is working our for them. For better or for worse, the human phenotype kicks ass. Expect the same story everywhere else. I will not bet my life on it, but I will bet a pizza. Although what I'm going to do with all these pizzas, I have no idea.