Astronomer Disputes Idea That Data Show Planets Orbiting Nearby Stars

Evidence believed to show that planets may be orbiting nearby stars may in fact indicate no such thing, a Canadian astronomer said.

In a report sure to dismay the astronomy establishment, John Gray of the University of Western Ontario questioned whether astronomers in Geneva were correct in their 1995 claim to have found the first planet outside our solar system.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory used measurements of the star 51 Pegasi, 40 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, to show that it was “wobbling.” They argued that this effect was caused by the gravitational pull of a large, orbiting planet.

But Gray took similar spectral images and said they could be natural variations in the radiation coming from the star. “The presence of a planet is not required to explain the data,” Gray wrote in a report in Nature.