What’s, like, the most stupendous thing you could discover? A new world.
Dr. Sarah Ballard is an astrophysicist, and she has discovered four new planets. We call these exoplanets. These are planets that orbit distant stars. And the way scientists find these planets — they’re too far away and too small to see through like a regular telescope — they use this satellite-based instrument to kind of look at different stars. And when they see the star dim just a tiny bit, there’s a good chance that it’s dimming because a planet is passing in front of it. It’s like a tiny eclipse.
So these satellites gather gazillions of these events, and then it’s up to scientists to slog through the data, and figure out if it really is a new planet, or if it’s something else — some other kind of little blip.
So in 2011, Sarah was between her fourth and fifth year of grad school at Harvard, and she was assigned this data set. It was a bunch of numbers that represented a piece of sky that had been observed, and then it was her job to sit there and wade through and see if there was a planet there.
Now, astronomy, and science in general, is really competitive. And for Sarah, being the ambitious young scientist that she was, there was a lot of pressure to discover something new. And as she went through the work, it looked like she had!
She had discovered a planet called Keplar-19B. Only this planet was kind of a troublemaker. It wasn’t really behaving the way it was supposed to. You know? You see these planets pass in front of their stars...they should do it on a regular basis. And this planet was misbehaving a little bit. It was arriving a little early sometimes, a little late sometimes ... something was off.
This planet was not telling a kind of straightforward story. So she started to think of reasons why that might be.
