LONDON - Evidence taken widely to show that planets may be orbiting nearby stars may in fact indicate no such thing, a Canadian astronomer said yesterday.
In a report sure to dismay the astronomical establishment, Prof John Gray of the University of Western Ontario questioned whether astronomers in Geneva were correct in their claim to have found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995.
Dr Michel Mayor and Dr Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory used measurements of the star 51 Pegasi to show it was "wobbling" and argued this was caused by the gravitational pull of a large, orbiting planet. But Dr Gray took similar spectral images and said they could be natural variations in the radiation coming from the star.