nyt imes.co m http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/finder-o f-new-worlds.html?ref=science&_r=0

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Finder of New Worlds

Science

BERKELEY, CALIF. — Last summer a homely room in the basement of a math building on the University ofCalif ornia campus here was ground zero in the epic quest to end cosmic loneliness.

An area rug with geometric shapes and yellow rings suggestive of planetary orbits covered the f loor. Aphotograph of the Milky Way rising over the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea hung on one wall. A Naugahydecouch ran along one side of the room. Opposite it was a small ref rigerator with a stash of Grape-Nuts andsoy milk.

The nearest bathroom was two sets of password-protected security doors away.

This is the lair of Geof f rey W. Marcy, holder of the Watson and Marilyn Alberts Chair in the Search f orExtraterrestrial Intelligence and, outside a certain robot spacecraf t named Kepler, the most prolif ic Americandiscoverer of alien worlds, so-called exoplanets circling stars beyond the sun.

An August evening f ound Dr. Marcy, a gray-goateed, twinkly-eyed presence with an aggressively empatheticair, crouched as usual in a corner in an old wooden desk chair. In f ront of him were computer screens and avideo display connecting him to Mauna Kea, home of the twin Keck telescopes, at 40 f eet in diameter thetwo largest in the world.

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Credit Illustration bySean McCabe;Photograph by BrianL. Frank f or The NewYork Times

He clicked an icon onone of his screens.Three thousandmiles west and14,000 f eet up, aglass containerabout the shape andsize of a tuna canslid into place in thebeam of the Keck Itelescope,interposing acalibrating layer ofiodine gas between it and the stars.

That was f arther away, he noted, than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Queued up f or observation f rom Mauna Kea that night were a f ew dozen of the most promising objects yetf ound by NASA’s vaunted planet-hunting Kepler spacecraf t.

“These are earths,” Dr. Marcy said, gesturing to the screens. “All my lif e I’ve pointed telescopes at stars not

knowing if planets were there or not. Now we know.”

He paused.

Humanity, he said, had arrived at a special but bittersweet moment.

For thousands of years, people had looked up at the night sky wondering whether they were alone in thesestarry depths, whether there was any place like Earth out there, and how they would ever know. Only 20years ago, the notion of other worlds and other lif e was dismissed as science f iction in respectableacademic circles. Now astronomers have evidence that there are more planets than stars out there, a billionchances f or Darwin, a billion potential real estate deals, a billion sci- f i dreams come true — a signatureshif t in cosmic perspective, in which Dr. Marcy played a leading role.

He and his colleagues were on the verge of being able to say how common Earthlike worlds were in thegalaxy.

Dr. Marcy was being mentioned as a contender f or the Nobel Prize.

But Kepler had broken down af ter f our years of planet-hunting glory, and plans had collapsed f or a grand,much-promoted space mission known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which could produce images ofdistant planets, snif f their atmospheres and perhaps map their geography to determine whether they werehabitable or inhabited.

The f ield, he f eared, was approaching a lull.

“What are we going to do when we’ve squeezed the last drop f rom Kepler?” Dr. Marcy asked. “A side of meis already grieving.”

Cosmic Dreams

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Dr. Marcy,wearing hisheart on hiscar bumper.Theastronomerhas notshied awayf romearthboundcauses,either.CreditRaminRahimianf or TheNew YorkTimesContinuereading themain story

The road tothe math building basement had been bumpy and long, and Dr. Marcy had the emotional bruises to show f orit. He was born 59 years ago in St. Clair Shores, Mich., and had what he called a “plain vanilla” upbringing in

the San Fernando Valley, imbued with a love of sports and space. Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, best-selling author and host of the PBS series “Cosmos,” was his hero.

He attended U.C.L.A. and then the University of Calif ornia, Santa Cruz, where he earned a Ph.D. usingspectroscopic measurements to study magnetic f ields in stars.

But the starry road almost ended shortly af ter that. Dr. Marcy won a prestigious postdoctoral f ellowship tocontinue his magnetic research at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, Calif ., where he would beusing the same telescope with which Edwin Hubble had discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929.

But Dr. Marcy’s measurements didn’t work and his previous results came under f ire f rom other astronomers.“I got really hammered in Pasadena,” he recalled.

He was devastated. He f elt stupid and ill judged. “I was so obviously a f raud,” he recalled thinking. Heconsulted a psychiatrist.

He wondered if he was suicidal. Then he wondered how he would know.

A turning point, he said, came while he was in the shower one morning in 1983, contemplating the end of hisastronomy career. He decided that if he was going down in f lames, he would go down doing something hebelieved in. He vowed to spend the rest of his career hunting f or lif e in the universe. That meant searchingf or planets around other stars.

“You need planets,” he said. “That stands at the nexus. The logical platf orm f or lif e is a planet.”

By the time he got out of the shower, his f ingers were all wrinkled.

“I’ve never f orgotten how miserable I was in that shower,” Dr. Marcy said.

A Fire in the Belly

When his f ellowship was up in 1983, Dr. Marcy took a job teaching at San Francisco State University, f arf rom the research limelight — it had no Ph.D. program. In his spare time, between teaching and f ixing thetelescope on the roof of the science building, he assembled a team of students to work on how to f indplanets around other stars — if they were out there.

One of his students was Mario Savio, f ormerly the f irebrand leader of the Free Speech Movement inBerkeley in the ’60s. In his of f ice, Dr. Marcy keeps a picture of Mr. Savio, who went on to teach physics atSonoma State and died in 1996, at 53. He was brilliant, Dr. Marcy recalled, but “he hated writ ing computercode.”

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Geof f Marcy is an exoplanet hunter who looks at the billions of planets we now understand to be circlingother stars and sees a near cosmic guarantee of intelligent lif e. Jef f ery DelViscio

A big break came when a graduate student, R. Paul Butler, who had just received an undergraduatechemistry degree, showed up in his of f ice in the f all of 1986.

A recipe f or f inding planets had been laid out by the eminent astronomer Otto Struve in 1952. He pointedout that a planet would give its home star a small gravitational kick, inducing a wobble into the star ’s motionas seen f rom Earth. In principle this could be detected by slight shif ts in the wavelengths of light f rom thestar, like the Doppler shif t that causes the pitch of an ambulance siren to change as it goes past. But it

required a spectrograph that could detect the shif ts of one part in 10 million to see something like Jupiter.

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Dr. Marcy’s new graduate student had “f ire in his belly,” he recalled, and he put him to work f inding a way tomake a spectrograph sensit ive enough to do the job. At Mount Wilson, Dr. Marcy already knew, solarastronomers calibrated their spectrographs by passing sunlight through iodine, which absorbs light atparticular wavelengths, producing dark lines like the gaps in a picket f ence that can serve as ref erencepoints.

Af ter considering other ideas, he and Mr. Butler settled on iodine to calibrate their own machine. Mr. Butlerbuilt a cell to hold iodine, and in 1987 they installed it on the Shane three-meter telescope at theuniversity’s Lick Observatory, outside San Jose, and began looking at stars.

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It took them eight years to ref ine their techniques to f ind a planet. Wavelength shif ts could be easilyblurred, f or example, by changes in the atmosphere f rom night to night or even moment to moment. Thesame ef f ects that make stars twinkle could make their planets indistinguishable.

“We were we struggling without any road map,” said Dr. Butler, who earned a Ph.D. f rom the University ofMaryland in the process and is now at the Carnegie Institution f or Science in Washington. “Nobody knewwho we were. The f ew people who knew what we were trying to do also knew that our quest was quixotic atbest, and more likely just f lat out laughable.”

Natalie Batalha, then a student at Berkeley and now a leader on the Kepler project, agreed.

Dr. Marcy, she said, “was a San Francisco State prof essor, hanging around Berkeley working on a programnobody had conf idence that it would come to anything.”

‘Like Being on Columbus’s Ship’

Just when they were getting good at searching, Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler were scooped.

In the f all of 1995, using the same wobble technique, a team led by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, of theUniversity of Geneva, f ound a planet roughly half the mass of Jupiter, circling the star 51 Pegasi, about 50light-years away, in only f our days — way inside of where Mercury orbits our sun. That was a majorsurprise. Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the sun, and astronomers had presumed that other planetarysystems would be structured like our own.

Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler dashed up to Lick Observatory and conf irmed the new planet. They came down themountain elated.

“It f elt like being on Columbus’s ship,” Dr. Marcy said.

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A Milky Way section which Kepler hasscanned f or planets. Credit CarterRoberts

Their own time came a f ew weeks later.

Early on the morning of Dec. 30, Dr. Marcyand his wif e, Susan Kegley, were gettingthe house ready f or a New Year’s Eveparty, when Dr. Butler called, summoninghim to the of f ice. “All he said was ‘Geof f ,

get over here,’ ” Dr. Marcy recalled later.

On a graph when he got there was theup-and-down velocity cycle of a giantplanet orbit ing the star 70 Virginis, about60 light-years f rom here.

With the next two years they f ound 10more planets, generating headlines butalso bruising controversy, as if Dr. Marcyhad never gotten out of that shower.Some prominent astronomers argued thatthe Marcy-Butler team was conf usingstarspots or double stars f or planets.The systems they were discovering weretoo unlike our solar system to be takenseriously.

“For three or f our years, nobody believedus,” Dr. Marcy said.

At one point he was invited to give a talk at a prominent meeting in Houston, home of the Lunar andPlanetary Institute. But when he got there he was ushered into a small room where half a dozen scientistsinterrogated him.

“It sent me into a tailspin,” Dr. Marcy said. “I was back to f eeling stupid.”

Finally, in November 1999, Dr. Marcy’s group and another team, led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center f or Astrophysics, more or less simultaneously detected the shadow of a planetcrossing, or “transit ing,” in f ront of a star that already had been seen to wobble. The combination ofwobble and blink was impossible to explain as anything other than a planet.

Sweet vindication at last? Perhaps, but Dr. Marcy still is quick to point out that the objections to his workwere never retracted.

One of the crit ics, David Black, an astronomer at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, says there isno apologizing in science.

“It was never personal, as he seems to think it was f or some reason that I have never been able to f igureout,” Dr. Black said. “I think Geof f deserves all of the credit and praise he has gotten f or his work.”

Strained Relationships

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By the end of the decade Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler, joined by Dr. Marcy’s old mentor Steven Vogt of theUniversity of Calif ornia, Santa Cruz, and Debra Fischer, now at Yale, f ound themselves in intensecompetit ion with Dr. Mayor ’s team, of ten ref erred to as “the Swiss.” The two groups leapf rogged eachother, adding to the planet count.

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The constellation Cygnus, which Keplerhas scanned f or planets. Credit PalomarObservatory, DSS; Davide De Martin, SkyFactory; Michael Benson

Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler were awarded the

Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler were awarded thef irst Bioastronomy Medal of Honor by theInternational Astronomical Union,beginning an avalanche of medals andawards. Dr. Marcy was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences and wason David Letterman’s show.

“We’re getting closer to answering thegolden question of whether there is lif eout there,” he said in 2004. “We’re tryingto f ind our own roots, chemically andbiologically, in the stars.”

By the end of 2005, he and Dr. Butler hadf ound 107 planets. They were the Batmanand Robin of astronomy. But as thepartnership grew, strains developed, withDr. Butler f eeling increasingly marginalizedas reporters f locked to the eloquent andemotionally available Dr. Marcy.

Dr. Butler was more brusque. When asked f or a sound bite he was more likely to grumble that he waslooking f orward to more data. “Some people want to be an astronomer, “ he said in an interview a f ew yearsago. “Other people just want to play one on TV.”

Matters grew tenser in 2005, when Dr. Marcy and Dr. Mayor were awarded a $1 million prize given annually bythe late Hong Kong f ilm mogul and philanthropist Run Run Shaw.

Dr. Marcy didn’t tell the rest of his team about the prize until he returned f rom Hong Kong.

“I was af raid it would cause the divorce it, in f act, caused,” he said later.

In 2007 Dr. Vogt resigned f rom the team, saying he had lost conf idence in Dr. Marcy’s leadership. Dr. Butlersoon f ollowed. The real heroes in the exoplanet story, he wrote in an email, are the astronomers who buildthe instruments. “In both my career and Geof f Marcy’s career, the single most important person is SteveVogt.”

Interviewed recently, a clearly uncomf ortable Dr. Marcy said he had been saddened but not surprised,comparing the rif t to the breakup of the Beatles. “I would never have lef t Paul and Steve,” he said. “They aref amily, period,”

He is unapologetic about his own f ame. “The news media likes me,” he said and added: “I’ve been lucky.Prof essional astronomers know I’ve been in the basement.” Dr. Marcy gave the bulk of his award to Cal-Santa Cruz and San Francisco State.

Dr. Batalha, of the Kepler project, said the rivalries of the early days of the exoplanet hunt had taken theirtoll. “It was a very intense competit ion,” she said. “It didn’t have to be. Everybody was racing to be f irst.”

The divorce had major consequences f or the Automated Planet Finder, a robot telescope that Dr. Vogt andDr. Marcy had been planning to build at Lick Observatory but was delayed f or years. “In divorce, the kids arethe telescopes,” she said.

Dr. Marcy eventually agreed to split the time on the telescope with the team of Dr. Vogt and Dr. Butler. Theydrew straws to divide the 1,700 stars on their target list and 12 years of data.

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Dr. Marcy,lef t, and aresearchpartner, Dr.Paul Butler,at Lick

Observatory in 1997. Dr. Butler eventually resigned f rom Dr. Marcy’s team. Credit Susan Spann

“At the end of the day you try to be honorable,” Dr. Vogt said. It began operating this year.

The Age of Kepler

Then came Kepler.

The NASA spacecraf t was launched in 2009 into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun. Its mission was tostare at one patch of stars f or f our years looking f or the periodic dimming that might signif y planetspassing in f ront of their suns.

The grand goal was to f ind Earthlike planets. The f raction of stars with such planets is known as eta-Earth; it is a key f actor in the so-called Drake Equation, used to calculate the number of intelligentcivilizations in the galaxy.

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If we ever have the ability to step out of our cosmic cocoon, the answer could help us decide whether therewill be anywhere to go, and how f ar away the nearest habitable planet might be.

Or as William Borucki, who spent 20 years persuading NASA to take on the Kepler project, said, “We providethe data mankind needs to move out into space.”

Kepler shook the sky as if it were a tree. More than 1,000 possible planets f ell out in the f irst year.

Dr. Marcy had been a member of Kepler ’s science team f rom the beginning, in 2001. But it was only in 2007,he said, that he f inally had time to start going to the meetings. “It changed my lif e by bringing Earth-sizeplanets into view,” he said.

“Geof f is a good guy,” said Dr. Batalha, Kepler ’s deputy science director. She described him as a graciousteam member, generous with credit and going out of his way to make younger astronomers f eel valued.

When the Kepler astronomers realized in 2012 that they would need more time than planned f or their

survey, Dr. Marcy put on his “lucky underwear,” as he put it, and went to NASA headquarters to argue f ormore time. “This is f or my students,” he said at the time.

When Kepler ’s pointing system f ailed a year later, cutting short its planet quest, Dr. Marcy was theatricallydespondent. Borrowing f rom a W. H Auden poem, he wrote:

Stop all the clocks, cut of f the Internet,

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“All my lif eI’ve pointedtelescopesat star notknowing ifplanetswere thereor not,” Dr.Geof f rey W.Marcy said.“Now weknow.”CreditEuropeanSouthern

Observatory

Prevent the dog f rom barking with a juicy bone,

Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead,

Skywrit ing over Cygnus: Kepler is dead.

‘Chicken Geoff’

Dr. Marcy lives high in the Berkeley hills with Dr. Kegley, “wif e, chemist, goddess,” as he puts it on hiswebsite — an environmental chemist and chief executive of the consulting f irm Pesticide Research Institute.Their backyard is home to beehives decorated with astronomical symbols, and a f lock of chickens, leadingthe son of one of his graduate students to call him “Chicken Geof f .”

Social consciousness is part of his identity. At Santa Cruz he ran around plastering “Men Against Rape”stickers over nude pinups in the engineering and optics shops.

At Berkeley he regularly hits the tennis courts with the women’s team. “They give me lessons,” he said.Perhaps ref lecting his own years of self -doubt, his website also has a section on depression and suicideawareness. “Now I know I wasn’t alone,” he said of those dark days in Pasadena. “It ’s a commonphenomenon.”

Once an outsider with no f uture, Dr. Marcy now has his pick of collaborators and students. “Myundergraduates are even smarter than my graduate students,” he said recently. He has also embraced thef reedom to be outspoken.

At a meeting at M.I.T. in 2011, he startled his colleagues with a bitter t irade about their collective f ailure to

win approval f or the Terrestrial Planet Finder and challenged President Obama to make a Kennedyesquedeclaration that we would send a probe to Alpha Centauri. That mission would revive the agency and maybethe nation, which he says has been squandering its technological leadership in the world.

“Every young person is wondering, ‘What will my generation do that my parents didn’t do?’ ” Dr. Marcy said.

His f ormer student Andrew W. Howard, now at the University of Hawaii, said Dr. Marcy had the ability to seethe big picture and what to do next.

“He tries to zero in on the right answer,” he said. “He’s not concentrated on litt le details.”

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This tendency was in play last f all when Erik Petigura, another of Dr. Marcy’s graduate students,announced, based on his own analysis of Kepler data, that about a f if th of the 100 billion sunlike stars inthe galaxy had potentially habitable Earth-size planets. In ef f ect he had beaten the Kepler team to the f irstestimate of the all- important eta-Earth.

Photo

The craf t’sbreakdown prompteda W.H. Auden-inspired poem by Dr.Marcy. Credit RaminRahimian f or TheNew York Times

Under Dr. Marcy’sdirection, Mr.Petigura had spentthe previous twoyears building andtesting his ownversion of thecomputer pipeline bywhich Kepler datawas analyzed.“Learning theoccurrence ofEarthlike planets canbe done only once,” Dr. Marcy told him. “Erik, you’re the one; you can sleep later.”

The announcement overshadowed a major exoplanet meeting at NASA’s Ames Research Center, even asastronomers agreed that it was only the f irst of what would be many tries at getting eta-Earth right. Mr.Petigura’s analysis was f ull of assumptions and extrapolations that would be tested and retested in thecoming years, astronomers said.

As Dr. Batalha, among others, pointed out, “we don’t yet have any planet candidates that are exactanalogues of the Earth in terms of size, orbit or star type.”

Dr. Marcy nevertheless pronounced himself “t ingly,” saying it was the most important work he had beeninvolved in. The National Academy of Sciences recently named their paper as the best on the physicalsciences published last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, giving it theCozzarelli Prize.

The Stars of Summer

One thing Kepler couldn’t do without outside help was to say what these putative planets were like. Byrecording those blinks, it could measure the sizes of planets, but not their masses and densities. Thusthere was no way to know whether these worlds were bags of gas or rocks like Earth.

That was where Dr. Marcy came in, along with the Keck telescope array and its ability to measure wobblesand masses.

“We’re pouring all our ef f ort into planets roughly the size of Earth,” Dr. Marcy said, “not just discovering butmeasuring the properties of Earth-size planets.

“The Greeks would have enjoyed this,” he added. “They would understand. This is not quantum f ieldtheory.”

He was particularly interested in learning at what size a planet went f rom being a rock with water on it, andpossibly habitable like Earth, to being gas, like Neptune. The question was of more than academic interest,since most of the Kepler planets are between Earth and Neptune in size. The data seemed to suggest, hesaid, that the break-even point between rocky and gaseous was about one and a half t imes the size ofEarth. Kepler has shown that there are plenty of such worlds out there.

But without the Terrestrial Planet Finder or something like it, the search f or Earth 2.0 could go only so f ar.You could f ind a planet with the mass and orbit of Earth, he explained, but “how do we know it ’s not anocean world like Kevin Costner, or dry as a bone?”

Once upon a time, astronomy was a romantic and physically grueling endeavor. Astronomers kissed theirspouses and children goodbye and decamped f or distant mountains, where they donned electrically heatedf light suits to survive a f rigid, nightlong telescope vigil.

On this night Dr. Marcy set up the telescope and its spectrometer with that tuna can of iodine, then headedhome f or a meal of wild salmon and tomatoes and f igs f rom his backyard. Thus f ortif ied, he returned towatch as Keck sent data f rom Hawaii to Berkeley.

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In hisCalif orniabackyard,Dr. Marcy isknown by amoreinf ormalname.CreditRaminRahimianf or TheNew YorkTimes

Over thenext f ewhours, arogue’sgallery ofstars, all ofthem home

tosuspected planets, swam into view, one af ter another. “They are my children,” he said.

One screen showed a star ’s spectrum — a picket f ence of dark and light, depending on which wavelengthsof light were there.

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Another screen showed previous measurements of that star ’s velocity cycle as determined by earlierobservations. Some looked like perf ect sine waves, the signature of a star being jerked rhythmically backand f orth by a planet; others were noisy clumps of points in which one could imagine regularity. Dr. Marcyprovided color commentary as if he were checking up on old f riends.

“This is a star pulling on a star,” he said as one came up.

He pointed to a small wiggle on another curve that suggested a second planet where there was alreadyone. “This is f rankly publishable now,” he said.

Another star, an old f riend known as 16 Cygni B came up with a saw-toothed pattern of motion, thesignature of an egg-shaped orbit. He recalled that he and Dr. Butler had been in his of f ice at 4 a.m. whenthey f irst saw it — the f ourth or f if th planet they had discovered — “and it ’s still interesting.”

“Look at this beauty,” Dr. Marcy exclaimed. “This is Isaac Newton screaming with joy f rom his grave.” Hecontinued with a chuckle: “This is my lif e. When we saw this, we were so excited. People didn’t realizeplanets could be in elliptical orbits.”

The thought brought him back to the days of being crit icized.

“It f eels like a black and white movie to me, really a horror f ilm,” he said. “I was really distressed with myself .

“Kepler taught us that planets are common. We didn’t know that.”

If Mr. Petigura’s analysis was right, he said, the nearest Earthlike planets could be as close as 10 or 12light-years away, within reach of a moderate-size telescope. “If you do T.P.F., you will not come up empty.”he said, ref erring to a Terrestrial Planet Finder. “You’ll have a handf ul of them. So we have our homework.”

By then the sky was getting cloudy in Hawaii. “Bad news, but this is astronomy,” Dr. Marcy said with a sighas he went to look f or bright stars that would punch through the clouds.

“One thing about having a big telescope,” he explained: “We can collect a lot of light through clouds.”

It was midnight when he moved on to the next star, one with f ive planets.

“This is a great thing,” he said. “I love this.” For him the night and the universe were young.