A former NASA astronomer who tentatively reported being the first to obtain a direct image of a planet beyond our solar system is about to retract the finding in print, saying more data now show the object is more likely a star.
Susan Terebey, who started her own research company after leaving NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory a few years ago, initially proposed that the object in the constellation Taurus -- which looked like a bright dot at the end of a stream of reflective dust -- was a planet ejected from the dust surrounding a double-star system.
Using the powerful Keck telescope in Hawaii to check out her initial 1997 data from NASA's Hubble space telescope, she later studied the object's temperature and found it was hotter than the predicted temperatures of young, giant planets about the size of the mysterious object.
and telling colleagues at scientific meetings that her theory on the object failed to pan out.
The object, calculated to weigh several times the mass of Jupiter, is named TMR-1C.
Now, in research to be published in the May Astronomical Journal, Terebey is going on the record.
"The new data do not lend weight to the protoplanet interpretation and the results remain consistent with the explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star," Terebey said in a prepared statement.
"Although the Hubble image is striking, there is the alternate possibility that TMR-1C is an unrelated background star seen, by chance, projected close to the young star system. Finding a clearer answer is difficult for an object as faint as TMR-1C."
In the past four or five years, astronomers have detected 30 so-called extrasolar planets beyond our nine. But when Terebey went public with her finding in 1998, she was the first to have possibly seen one directly, rather than inferring a planet's presence by observing its gravitational tug on nearby stars.
Since then,
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