Discovery
On January 16, 2002, a team of astronomers (led by Geoff Marcy) announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet around 54 Piscium using the radial velocity method, a process utilizes the "wobbling" effect that a star may experience if something is tugging on it, to define the presence of a planetary body. The planet has been estimated to have a mass of only 20 percent that of Jupiter (making the planet around the same size and mass of Saturn).
Read more about this topic: 54 Piscium B
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)