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The Lost Planets: Peter van de Kamp and the Vanishing Exoplanets around Barnard's Star
A fascinating account of the pioneering astronomer who claimed (erroneously) to have discovered a planet outside the solar system.
There are innumerable planets revolving around innumerable stars across our galaxy. Between 2009 and 2018, NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered thousands of them. But exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—appeared in science fiction before they appeared in telescopes. Astronomers in the early decades of the twentieth century spent entire careers searching for planets in other stellar systems. In The Lost Planets, John Wenz offers an account of the pioneering astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.
Van de Kamp, working at Swarthmore College's observatory, announced in 1963 that he had identified a planet around Barnard's star, the second-closest star system to the Sun. He cited the deviations in Barnard's star's path—“wobbles” that suggested a large object was lurching around the star. Van de Kamp became something of a celebrity (appearing on a television show with “Mr. Wizard,” Don Henry), but subsequent research did not support his claims. Wenz describes van de Kamp's stubborn refusal to accept that he was wrong, discusses the evidence found by other researchers, and explains recent advances in exoplanet detection, including transit, radial velocity, direct imaging, and microlensing.
Van de Kamp retired from Swarthmore in 1972, and died in 1995 at 93. In 2009, Swarthmore named its new observatory the Peter van de Kamp Observatory. In the 1990s, astronomers discovered and confirmed the first planet outside our solar system. In 2018, an exoplanet was detected around Barnard's star—not, however, the one van de Kamp thought he had discovered in 1963.
There are innumerable planets revolving around innumerable stars across our galaxy. Between 2009 and 2018, NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered thousands of them. But exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—appeared in science fiction before they appeared in telescopes. Astronomers in the early decades of the twentieth century spent entire careers searching for planets in other stellar systems. In The Lost Planets, John Wenz offers an account of the pioneering astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who was one of the first to claim discovery of exoplanets.
Van de Kamp, working at Swarthmore College's observatory, announced in 1963 that he had identified a planet around Barnard's star, the second-closest star system to the Sun. He cited the deviations in Barnard's star's path—“wobbles” that suggested a large object was lurching around the star. Van de Kamp became something of a celebrity (appearing on a television show with “Mr. Wizard,” Don Henry), but subsequent research did not support his claims. Wenz describes van de Kamp's stubborn refusal to accept that he was wrong, discusses the evidence found by other researchers, and explains recent advances in exoplanet detection, including transit, radial velocity, direct imaging, and microlensing.
Van de Kamp retired from Swarthmore in 1972, and died in 1995 at 93. In 2009, Swarthmore named its new observatory the Peter van de Kamp Observatory. In the 1990s, astronomers discovered and confirmed the first planet outside our solar system. In 2018, an exoplanet was detected around Barnard's star—not, however, the one van de Kamp thought he had discovered in 1963.
200 pages, Hardcover
Published October 8, 2019
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About the author
John Wenz
4 books9 followersJohn Wenz is Digital Producer at Knowable Magazine. His writing has appeared in publications including Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Daily Beast, Vice Magazine, Wired, and the Atlantic.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 1, 2020
Reading the first few lines of the introduction to this book caused a raised eyebrow. In 1600, it tells us, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake 'for his radical views - that not only was the Sun just one of many stars, but those stars likely had planets around them as well.' Unfortunately, this bends the truth. Bruno was burned at the stake for holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith - for conventional heretical beliefs amongst which his ideas on cosmology were trivial. This was an unfortunate start.
What John Wenz gives us is a people-driven story of the apparent early discovery of a number of planets orbiting other stars, made by Peter van de Kamp and his colleagues at Swarthmore College in America, most notably connected to a relatively obscure star called Barnard's star. Wenz is at his best dealing with personal conflict. The book really comes alive in a middle section where van de Kamp's discoveries are starting to be challenged. This chapter works well.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book has two problems. It has a rambling structure, jumping around a lot, and it contains both technical issues and some odd phraseology. Leaving aside the irritation that it mostly doesn't even give metric units as an alternative to US traditional, those issues include a really unhelpful description of parallax, the statement that dark matter was 'inferred from the movement of galactic dust' - it wasn't - and the statement 'where the Sproul refractor was 24 inches, Hale's was 200', as if there was no distinction between refracting and reflecting telescopes.
We get the odd phrasing from page 1 where we encounter 'When we look at it in the night sky, we're seeing the star as it was nearly nine years ago, all thanks to the funny workings of physics.' It's hard to see why something taking time to get from A to B is 'funny workings'. There are more than the usual number of typos - for example 'He personality recruited Kaj Strand' - and there's a tendency for the same information to appear more than once. Sometimes, there is uncomfortably clumsy phrasing, as in 'Space-based astrometry was finally realized with Hipparchos, a European Space Agency mission to do space-based astrometry.' Well, yes, I suppose it would be.
Quite a lot of this has to be put down to a lack of editing on the part of the publisher - all authors generate their share of text that needs improving, but here it hasn't been. The story of the collapse of van de Kamp's discoveries would make a really good article - it's interesting, readable and engaging. But the science content isn't put across particularly well and the rest of the book has too much detail on secondary characters and various other possible planets.
What John Wenz gives us is a people-driven story of the apparent early discovery of a number of planets orbiting other stars, made by Peter van de Kamp and his colleagues at Swarthmore College in America, most notably connected to a relatively obscure star called Barnard's star. Wenz is at his best dealing with personal conflict. The book really comes alive in a middle section where van de Kamp's discoveries are starting to be challenged. This chapter works well.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book has two problems. It has a rambling structure, jumping around a lot, and it contains both technical issues and some odd phraseology. Leaving aside the irritation that it mostly doesn't even give metric units as an alternative to US traditional, those issues include a really unhelpful description of parallax, the statement that dark matter was 'inferred from the movement of galactic dust' - it wasn't - and the statement 'where the Sproul refractor was 24 inches, Hale's was 200', as if there was no distinction between refracting and reflecting telescopes.
We get the odd phrasing from page 1 where we encounter 'When we look at it in the night sky, we're seeing the star as it was nearly nine years ago, all thanks to the funny workings of physics.' It's hard to see why something taking time to get from A to B is 'funny workings'. There are more than the usual number of typos - for example 'He personality recruited Kaj Strand' - and there's a tendency for the same information to appear more than once. Sometimes, there is uncomfortably clumsy phrasing, as in 'Space-based astrometry was finally realized with Hipparchos, a European Space Agency mission to do space-based astrometry.' Well, yes, I suppose it would be.
Quite a lot of this has to be put down to a lack of editing on the part of the publisher - all authors generate their share of text that needs improving, but here it hasn't been. The story of the collapse of van de Kamp's discoveries would make a really good article - it's interesting, readable and engaging. But the science content isn't put across particularly well and the rest of the book has too much detail on secondary characters and various other possible planets.
January 3, 2020
Covers the saga of Peter van de Kamp's tenure at the Sproul observatory and the successes (with stars) and failures (with planets) of the Swarthmore astrometric program.
This is both a cautionary tale of trying to extract more signal from data than it has to give, and a respectful history of the characters involved — PVDK was an extremely well respected scientist, and the new Swarthmore observatory has been rightly named after him despite the failure of the Barnard star proposed planets to materialize.
This is both a cautionary tale of trying to extract more signal from data than it has to give, and a respectful history of the characters involved — PVDK was an extremely well respected scientist, and the new Swarthmore observatory has been rightly named after him despite the failure of the Barnard star proposed planets to materialize.
July 31, 2023
This is an interesting volume on the earlier less heralded search for exoplanets, namely, the Peter van de Kamp search and a few others. The volume starts off by introducing the cast of characters involved in the earlier search and the roles they played. The volume is somewhat tedious in the beginning and it begins to pick up mid-volume, becoming more and more compelling as the narrative of the search for exoplanets nears the current day. It examines the technical limitations of the earlier efforts and also the various methods used in attempting to detect exoplanets. A fairly compelling read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews