Barnard's Star
Earlier this century, astronomers thought
that Barnard's Star was circled by planets, but this proved not to be true.
American astronomer Edward Barnard, while working at Yerks Observatory,
discovered a star in the constellation Ophiuchus that had a large proper
motion. Every 180 years Barnard's Star travels the equivalent to
a full lunar diameter across the sky. After measuring the parallax,
astrometrists discovered the star was only 6.0 light years away, making
it the second closest star to the Sun.
After acquiring over two thousand
photographic plates, Peter van de Kamp observed that the star was not moving
in a straight path through space. Instead, it showed a "wobble",
which could be caused by an unseen planet. Van de Kamp first predicted
a planet 60% more massive than Jupiter, with an orbital period of twenty-four
years. Later, he proposed a new model, with two planets, that revolved
around the star every twelve and twenty years.
Then astronomers Gatewood and Eichhorn
investigated Barnard's Star and came up with data contradictory to van
de Kamps. This led many astronomers to challenge the planets, and
no more data ever confirmed their existance. This led to the downfall
of the idea that planets orbited Barnard's Star, and some say that the
"wobble" came from a problem with van de Kamp's telescope.
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