DID a European team not play fair when it announced the discovery of the first rocky planet outside our solar system, pipping US astronomers to the post? Maybe so, if some comments by the Americans are anything to go by.
The tense but friendly rivalry goes back to 1995, when a team led by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva in Switzerland discovered the first ever extrasolar planet. Soon after that, a US team led by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, went on to find many more of these massive planets, known as hot Jupiters due to their searing proximity to the host stars.
Now Mayor and Queloz seem to have done it again. On 25 August, they announced a new kind of extrasolar planet, a much smaller, probably rocky 鈥渟uper Earth鈥� with about the mass of Uranus. A week later, Marcy and Butler鈥檚 team went public with news of two similar new planets.
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The American researchers say that while their discoveries have already been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, Mayor and Queloz have only just submitted their paper for review. Nuno Santos, a member of the European team, admits that they knew in advance about one of the rival papers, but says this did not influence their timing. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 announce our planet before we were planning to anyway,鈥� he told New 杏吧原创.