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Bad Astronomy has an article about an astronomer who had observational data to suggest he had discovered a planet around another star and published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. In 1855.
We now know, with further, more accurate observations, that no such planet exists there, and the offsets are the product of uncertainty in the telescopic observations that were, to be fair, done by eye.
But still, despite that, I must tip my hat to Jacob. He did his homework, made the best observations and calculations he could, expressed skepticism in his writing, and came up with what he thought was the best explanation. Mind you, again to be fair, this took a great deal of cleverness to dream up. Perhaps he had been influenced by the recent discovery of Neptune.
If anything, he was guilty of overconfidence in his own measurements. Still, technology eventually caught up with his imagination and we did start to find alien worlds. The field of exoplanet research is now a thriving one, which has moved beyond the simple discovery stage to one where we are beginning to physically categorize and model them.
Not so incidentally, we have since found planets orbiting other stars using the method Jacob pioneered in 1855. He may have been the first person ever to publish this idea, and for that he deserves acknowledgment.
This short video gives some more information and context of the man and his (unfortunately erroneous) discovery. The original paper is also freely available.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 12 2016, @05:57PM
That's the big lesson here
I don't know that that's really a "lesson" here, since the science of statistics, including error calculations, was still in its infancy at this time. Astronomers were making do with cruder methods to try to estimate error, and Jacob's work was doing what he could at the time.
It's noteworthy that this whole thing happened within a couple decades after the first clear measurements of stellar parallax, which had been hypothesized since the late 1500s at least, but which took centuries to actually locate and measure, due to both imprecision in equipment and then due to the inadequacy of statistical error measures of the day. Also notably, Friedrich Bessel -- who was one of the first to make a successful measurement of parallax -- was also one of the people to suggest perturbations in Sirius may be caused by a "dark body" before Jacob's work here (and which Jacob explicitly alludes to)... in 1862, the "dark" Sirius companion was shown to be a white dwarf star.
So, with crude statistical methods and the idea of unseen "dark" bodies and stellar companions in the air, Jacob's hypothesis seemed at least a reasonable idea.