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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 of
Calif 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. A
photograph of the Milky Way rising over the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea hung on one wall. A Naugahyde
couch ran along one side of the room. Opposite it was a small ref rigerator with a stash of Grape-Nuts and
soy 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 or
Extraterrestrial Intelligence and, outside a certain robot spacecraf t named Kepler, the most prolif ic American
discoverer 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 empathetic
air, crouched as usual in a corner in an old wooden desk chair. In f ront of him were computer screens and a
video display connecting him to Mauna Kea, home of the twin Keck telescopes, at 40 f eet in diameter the
two largest in the world.
Photo
Credit Illustration by
Sean McCabe;
Photograph by Brian
L. Frank f or The New
York Times
He clicked an icon on
one of his screens.
Three thousand
miles west and
14,000 f eet up, a
glass container
about the shape and
size of a tuna can
slid into place in the
beam of the Keck I
telescope,
interposing a
calibrating layer of
iodine 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 yet
f ound by NASAs vaunted planet-hunting Kepler spacecraf t.
These are earths, Dr. Marcy said, gesturing to the screens. All my lif e Ive 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 these
starry depths, whether there was any place like Earth out there, and how they would ever know. Only 20
years ago, the notion of other worlds and other lif e was dismissed as science f iction in respectable
academic circles. Now astronomers have evidence that there are more planets than stars out there, a billion
chances f or Darwin, a billion potential real estate deals, a billion sci-f i dreams come true a signature
shif 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 the
galaxy.
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 of
distant planets, snif f their atmospheres and perhaps map their geography to determine whether they were
habitable or inhabited.
The f ield, he f eared, was approaching a lull.
What are we going to do when weve squeezed the last drop f rom Kepler? Dr. Marcy asked. A side of me
is already grieving.
Cosmic Dreams
Photo
Dr. Marcy,
wearing his
heart on his
car bumper.
The
astronomer
has not
shied away
f rom
earthbound
causes,
either.
Credit
Ramin
Rahimian
f or The
New York
Times
Continue
reading the
main story
The road to
the math building basement had been bumpy and long, and Dr. Marcy had the emotional bruises to show f or
it. 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. using
spectroscopic 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 to
continue his magnetic research at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, Calif ., where he would be
using the same telescope with which Edwin Hubble had discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929.
But Dr. Marcys measurements didnt 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. He
consulted 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 his
astronomy career. He decided that if he was going down in f lames, he would go down doing something he
believed in. He vowed to spend the rest of his career hunting f or lif e in the universe. That meant searching
f 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.
Ive 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 ar
f rom the research limelight it had no Ph.D. program. In his spare time, between teaching and f ixing the
telescope on the roof of the science building, he assembled a team of students to work on how to f ind
planets 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 in
Berkeley in the 60s. In his of f ice, Dr. Marcy keeps a picture of Mr. Savio, who went on to teach physics at
Sonoma State and died in 1996, at 53. He was brilliant, Dr. Marcy recalled, but he hated writing computer
code.
Audio
Podcast : Searching f or Ot her Eart hs 17:21
Play
Geof f Marcy is an exoplanet hunter who looks at the billions of planets we now understand to be circling
other 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 undergraduate
chemistry 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 pointed
out that a planet would give its home star a small gravitational kick, inducing a wobble into the stars motion
as seen f rom Earth. In principle this could be detected by slight shif ts in the wavelengths of light f rom the
star, 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. Marcys new graduate student had f ire in his belly, he recalled, and he put him to work f inding a way to
make a spectrograph sensitive enough to do the job. At Mount Wilson, Dr. Marcy already knew, solar
astronomers calibrated their spectrographs by passing sunlight through iodine, which absorbs light at
particular wavelengths, producing dark lines like the gaps in a picket f ence that can serve as ref erence
points.
Af ter considering other ideas, he and Mr. Butler settled on iodine to calibrate their own machine. Mr. Butler
built a cell to hold iodine, and in 1987 they installed it on the Shane three-meter telescope at the
universitys Lick Observatory, outside San Jose, and began looking at stars.
Continue reading the main story
It took them eight years to ref ine their techniques to f ind a planet. Wavelength shif ts could be easily
blurred, f or example, by changes in the atmosphere f rom night to night or even moment to moment. The
same 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 of
Maryland in the process and is now at the Carnegie Institution f or Science in Washington. Nobody knew
who we were. The f ew people who knew what we were trying to do also knew that our quest was quixotic at
best, 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 program
nobody had conf idence that it would come to anything.
Like Being on Columbuss 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 the
University of Geneva, f ound a planet roughly half the mass of Jupiter, circling the star 51 Pegasi, about 50
light-years away, in only f our days way inside of where Mercury orbits our sun. That was a major
surprise. Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the sun, and astronomers had presumed that other planetary
systems 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 the
mountain elated.
It f elt like being on Columbuss ship, Dr. Marcy said.
Photo
A Milky Way section which Kepler has
scanned f or planets. Credit Carter
Roberts
Their own time came a f ew weeks later.
Early on the morning of Dec. 30, Dr. Marcy
and his wif e, Susan Kegley, were getting
the house ready f or a New Years Eve
party, when Dr. Butler called, summoning
him 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 the
up-and-down velocity cycle of a giant
planet orbiting the star 70 Virginis, about
60 light-years f rom here.
With the next two years they f ound 10
more planets, generating headlines but
also bruising controversy, as if Dr. Marcy
had never gotten out of that shower.
Some prominent astronomers argued that
the Marcy-Butler team was conf using
starspots or double stars f or planets.
The systems they were discovering were
too unlike our solar system to be taken
seriously.
For three or f our years, nobody believed
us, Dr. Marcy said.
At one point he was invited to give a talk at a prominent meeting in Houston, home of the Lunar and
Planetary Institute. But when he got there he was ushered into a small room where half a dozen scientists
interrogated him.
It sent me into a tailspin, Dr. Marcy said. I was back to f eeling stupid.
Finally, in November 1999, Dr. Marcys 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 planet
crossing, or transiting, in f ront of a star that already had been seen to wobble. The combination of
wobble 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 work
were never retracted.
One of the critics, David Black, an astronomer at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, says there is
no 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 igure
out, Dr. Black said. I think Geof f deserves all of the credit and praise he has gotten f or his work.
Strained Relationships
Continue reading the main story
By the end of the decade Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler, joined by Dr. Marcys old mentor Steven Vogt of the
University of Calif ornia, Santa Cruz, and Debra Fischer, now at Yale, f ound themselves in intense
competition with Dr. Mayors team, of ten ref erred to as the Swiss. The two groups leapf rogged each
other, adding to the planet count.
Photo
The constellation Cygnus, which Kepler
has scanned f or planets. Credit Palomar
Observatory, DSS; Davide De Martin, Sky
Factory; Michael Benson
Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler were awarded the
Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler were awarded the
f irst Bioastronomy Medal of Honor by the
International Astronomical Union,
beginning an avalanche of medals and
awards. Dr. Marcy was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences and was
on David Lettermans show.
Were getting closer to answering the
golden question of whether there is lif e
out there, he said in 2004. Were trying
to f ind our own roots, chemically and
biologically, in the stars.
By the end of 2005, he and Dr. Butler had
f ound 107 planets. They were the Batman
and Robin of astronomy. But as the
partnership grew, strains developed, with
Dr. Butler f eeling increasingly marginalized
as reporters f locked to the eloquent and
emotionally available Dr. Marcy.
Dr. Butler was more brusque. When asked f or a sound bite he was more likely to grumble that he was
looking f orward to more data. Some people want to be an astronomer, he said in an interview a f ew years
ago. 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 by
the late Hong Kong f ilm mogul and philanthropist Run Run Shaw.
Dr. Marcy didnt 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. Marcys leadership. Dr. Butler
soon f ollowed. The real heroes in the exoplanet story, he wrote in an email, are the astronomers who build
the instruments. In both my career and Geof f Marcys career, the single most important person is Steve
Vogt.
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 are
f amily, period,
He is unapologetic about his own f ame. The news media likes me, he said and added: Ive been lucky.
Prof essional astronomers know Ive 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 their
toll. It was a very intense competition, she said. It didnt 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 and
Dr. Marcy had been planning to build at Lick Observatory but was delayed f or years. In divorce, the kids are
the telescopes, she said.
Dr. Marcy eventually agreed to split the time on the telescope with the team of Dr. Vogt and Dr. Butler. They
drew straws to divide the 1,700 stars on their target list and 12 years of data.
Photo
Dr. Marcy,
lef t, and a
research
partner, Dr.
Paul Butler,
at Lick
Observatory in 1997. Dr. Butler eventually resigned f rom Dr. Marcys 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 to
stare at one patch of stars f or f our years looking f or the periodic dimming that might signif y planets
passing 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 intelligent
civilizations in the galaxy.
Continue reading the main story
If we ever have the ability to step out of our cosmic cocoon, the answer could help us decide whether there
will 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 provide
the 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 Keplers 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-size
planets into view, he said.
Geof f is a good guy, said Dr. Batalha, Keplers deputy science director. She described him as a gracious
team 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 or
more time. This is f or my students, he said at the time.
When Keplers pointing system f ailed a year later, cutting short its planet quest, Dr. Marcy was theatrically
despondent. Borrowing f rom a W. H Auden poem, he wrote:
Stop all the clocks, cut of f the Internet,
Photo
All my lif e
Ive pointed
telescopes
at star not
knowing if
planets
were there
or not, Dr.
Geof f rey W.
Marcy said.
Now we
know.
Credit
European
Southern
Observatory
Prevent the dog f rom barking with a juicy bone,
Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead,
Skywriting 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 his
website 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, leading
the 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 womens 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 suicide
awareness. Now I know I wasnt alone, he said of those dark days in Pasadena. Its a common
phenomenon.
Once an outsider with no f uture, Dr. Marcy now has his pick of collaborators and students. My
undergraduates are even smarter than my graduate students, he said recently. He has also embraced the
f reedom to be outspoken.
At a meeting at M.I.T. in 2011, he startled his colleagues with a bitter tirade about their collective f ailure to
win approval f or the Terrestrial Planet Finder and challenged President Obama to make a Kennedyesque
declaration that we would send a probe to Alpha Centauri. That mission would revive the agency and maybe
the 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 didnt do? Dr. Marcy said.
His f ormer student Andrew W. Howard, now at the University of Hawaii, said Dr. Marcy had the ability to see
the big picture and what to do next.
He tries to zero in on the right answer, he said. Hes not concentrated on little details.
Continue reading the main story
This tendency was in play last f all when Erik Petigura, another of Dr. Marcys graduate students,
announced, based on his own analysis of Kepler data, that about a f if th of the 100 billion sunlike stars in
the galaxy had potentially habitable Earth-size planets. In ef f ect he had beaten the Kepler team to the f irst
estimate of the all-important eta-Earth.
Photo
The craf ts
breakdown prompted
a W.H. Auden-
inspired poem by Dr.
Marcy. Credit Ramin
Rahimian f or The
New York Times
Under Dr. Marcys
direction, Mr.
Petigura had spent
the previous two
years building and
testing his own
version of the
computer pipeline by
which Kepler data
was analyzed.
Learning the
occurrence of
Earthlike planets can
be done only once, Dr. Marcy told him. Erik, youre the one; you can sleep later.
The announcement overshadowed a major exoplanet meeting at NASAs Ames Research Center, even as
astronomers agreed that it was only the f irst of what would be many tries at getting eta-Earth right. Mr.
Petiguras analysis was f ull of assumptions and extrapolations that would be tested and retested in the
coming years, astronomers said.
As Dr. Batalha, among others, pointed out, we dont yet have any planet candidates that are exact
analogues of the Earth in terms of size, orbit or star type.
Dr. Marcy nevertheless pronounced himself tingly, saying it was the most important work he had been
involved in. The National Academy of Sciences recently named their paper as the best on the physical
sciences published last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, giving it the
Cozzarelli Prize.
The Stars of Summer
One thing Kepler couldnt do without outside help was to say what these putative planets were like. By
recording those blinks, it could measure the sizes of planets, but not their masses and densities. Thus
there 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 wobbles
and masses.
Were pouring all our ef f ort into planets roughly the size of Earth, Dr. Marcy said, not just discovering but
measuring the properties of Earth-size planets.
The Greeks would have enjoyed this, he added. They would understand. This is not quantum f ield
theory.
He was particularly interested in learning at what size a planet went f rom being a rock with water on it, and
possibly 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, he
said, that the break-even point between rocky and gaseous was about one and a half times the size of
Earth. 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 its not an
ocean world like Kevin Costner, or dry as a bone?
Once upon a time, astronomy was a romantic and physically grueling endeavor. Astronomers kissed their
spouses and children goodbye and decamped f or distant mountains, where they donned electrically heated
f 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 headed
home f or a meal of wild salmon and tomatoes and f igs f rom his backyard. Thus f ortif ied, he returned to
watch as Keck sent data f rom Hawaii to Berkeley.
Photo
In his
Calif ornia
backyard,
Dr. Marcy is
known by a
more
inf ormal
name.
Credit
Ramin
Rahimian
f or The
New York
Times
Over the
next f ew
hours, a
rogues
gallery of
stars, all of
them home
to
suspected planets, swam into view, one af ter another. They are my children, he said.
One screen showed a stars spectrum a picket f ence of dark and light, depending on which wavelengths
of light were there.
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Another screen showed previous measurements of that stars velocity cycle as determined by earlier
observations. Some looked like perf ect sine waves, the signature of a star being jerked rhythmically back
and f orth by a planet; others were noisy clumps of points in which one could imagine regularity. Dr. Marcy
provided 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 already
one. 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, the
signature of an egg-shaped orbit. He recalled that he and Dr. Butler had been in his of f ice at 4 a.m. when
they f irst saw it the f ourth or f if th planet they had discovered and its still interesting.
Look at this beauty, Dr. Marcy exclaimed. This is Isaac Newton screaming with joy f rom his grave. He
continued with a chuckle: This is my lif e. When we saw this, we were so excited. People didnt realize
planets could be in elliptical orbits.
The thought brought him back to the days of being criticized.
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 didnt know that.
If Mr. Petiguras analysis was right, he said, the nearest Earthlike planets could be as close as 10 or 12
light-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. Youll 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 sigh
as 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.