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posted by FatPhil on Monday December 12 2016, @03:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the orbital-mockanics dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 12 2016, @05:00PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday December 12 2016, @05:00PM (#440438) Homepage
    Quoth the Bad Astronomer: "You can see the overall elliptical shape of the orbit, but also the small offsets in the secondary star’s position. I will admit, as the astronomer Captain W. S. Jacob claims in the paper, it does look like a periodic swing to the offsets, as if some invisible object is tugging 70 Oph B first one way than another."

    Does it? Does it really. It looks like noise to me. Yes, it swings from one side of the line to the other, but so does noise. Look at 1850 and 1860 - it's on both sides of the line at almost the same time. If that doesn't say "the noise is |<- this ->| wide", I don't know what does. I'm happy that Phil Plait, who I much admire, is prepared to admit to seeing the pattern, but I don't see it all. I'm not 100% sure where the dots plotted on that graph come from, as there are more datapoints there than in the original paper. In addition, as there's a predicted period, it would have been nice for that prediction to be overlaid on the graph, so that we could double-check that the data visually matches the prediction. I'm guessing it won't.

    I don't wish to criticise the enthusiasm of the good captain at all, though, and I am very impressed that he is happy to limit his claim to "highly probably", and then to ask others to verify - which is an implicit request to falsify too.
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 12 2016, @05:58PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday December 12 2016, @05:58PM (#440478)

    The interesting thing, to me, is that even if there's a clear pattern in the data, that doesn't mean the conclusion was right if the mechanism for collecting that data isn't any good.

    I was taught this back in high school, though: One of the first physics class experiments involved using a ticker-tape mechanism to time how long it took differently massed but similarly shaped objects to fall from the table to the floor. Our data quite conclusively showed that the heavier objects were consistently hitting the floor sooner than the lighter objects. So we had a brief moment of triumph as we announced "Galileo was wrong! Heavier objects do fall faster!", until the teacher asked us to consider what forms of experimental error might be at work. Which we eventually tracked down to the friction within the ticker-tape mechanism, of course.

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  • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday December 12 2016, @06:15PM

    by vux984 (5045) on Monday December 12 2016, @06:15PM (#440488)

    Look at 1850 and 1860 - it's on both sides of the line at almost the same time

    He published his paper in 1855; so he wouldn't have had the 1860 data points yet. ;)

    And you have to realize also how low quality the data was, and how rudimentary even error was; how young the field of statistics itself was. The word 'median' to divide a set in half had just been coined in 1843. The chi-squared test wasn't 'discovered/invented' for another 45 years...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @09:06PM (#440552)

    I understand your point about the noise, but there is a definite recurring pattern to the shifts which makes it less likely to be just noise in the data.