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Article: Two extrasolar planets may hold water.(Science News of the Week)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- January 27, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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They'd been hunting for planets since 1987, but last October, Geoffrey W. Marcy and R. Paul Butler moved into the fast lane. That's when they confirmed another team's landmark finding of an unseen planet circling the ordinary, sunlike star 51 Pegasi (SN: 10/21/95, p. 260).
From that point on, Marcy, of San Francisco State University, and Butler, of San Francisco State and the University of California, Berkeley, have run their search in high gear. Working 14-hour days to crunch their data on six high-speed computers, the astronomers hoped that at least 1 of the first 60 stars in their 120-star survey would exhibit the wobble characteristic of a planet's tug.
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