WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 47The grand fraud
Thomas Jefferson Jackson See
(1866–1962) was a lot of things.
He was a brilliant astronomer
— at least, if you asked him. But
his peers saw him as something
else: arrogant and prone to
plagiarism. Thomas J. Sherrill,
a Lockheed engineer and
astrophysicist, wrote in a 1999
paper published in the Journal
for the History of Astronomy
that few scientists of the early
20th century “inspire a degree
of rancour comparable to that
evoked” by See.
Sherrill states that although
See had a “solid background in
celestial mechanics,” his latter
work “[diverged] from his
astronomical colleagues in
striking ways.”
An 1895 paper published in
The Astronomical Journal was
especially audacious. “Since
August 20, when I first
announced to you the existence
of peculiar anomalies in the
motion of the companion of
F.70 Ophiuchi, I have suc-
ceeded in showing conclusively
that the system is perturbed by
an unseen body,” See said, his
arrogance readily apparent.
When an 1899 paper by
Forest Moulton challenged the
findings — claiming that the
three-body problem proposed
by See would f ling a planet out
of the binary star system — See
wrote a letter to the journal so
vitriolic that most of it was
redacted, and he was nearly
banned from further publica-
tion. (The editors instead said
See would be heavily censored
in future communications.)
See attempted a second
career as a geologist beforepublishing books about the
formation of the solar system,
which Sherrill says had a few
correct assertions, but “many
more were speculations pre-
sented with little justification,
and others were borrowed from
his contemporaries.”
See’s eventual undoing was a
supposed biography written by
a journalist who turned out to
be See himself, playing up his
own brilliance. By the time he
had taken to writing bitter let-
ters (a few of which appeared in
The New York Times) about
Albert Einstein’s theories, few,
if any, members of the science
community heard him out.
“See was indeed a most col-
orful person, and probably quite
brilliant, but he seemed to be
extremely paranoid and double-
dealing,” says David DeVorkin,
senior curator of astronomy at
the Smithsonian National Air
and Space Museum.
See was also not the first
person to propose a planet
around 70 Ophiuchi. William
Stephen Jacob of the Madras
Observatory put forth the idea
in 1855. After See, astronomers
Dirk Reuyl and Erik Holberg
brought it back in 1943. A.
Vibert Douglas wrote in a 1955
article in the Journal of the
Royal Astronomical Society of
Canada that the planet is “more
remote from its star than Jupiter
from the sun. Jupiter is believed
to be wholly incased in ice, so
that the likelihood of life on 70
Ophiuchi C is negligible.”
But to date, no planet has
been confirmed. So why has
this binary star system so
entranced astronomers?
DeVorkin says it’s because
70 Ophiuchi is a “close-by low-
mass system that’s relatively
easy to observe.
“Old ideas die hard,” he adds.The man of wonder
See had no standing left in the
astronomical community by- He was eventually, as
DeVorkin says, “banished to
Mare Island,” a small observa-
tory in San Francisco.
Astronomer Peter van de
Kamp (1901–1995) was nothing
like See. While See was arro-
gant and unscrupulous, van de
Kamp was gregarious and pop-
ular. While See failed to make
lasting contributions to the
field of astrophysics, van de
Kamp wrote the book on 20th-
century astrometry.
But both had one thing in
common: planets that vanished
upon further scrutiny.
Van de Kamp was a popular
professor known for dynamic
lectures, a love of classical
music, and his amiable
demeanor. As the director of
Sproul Observatory at
Swarthmore College, van de
Kamp became a trusted adviser
to several students, teaching
them astrometry, a technique
that measures the precise posi-
tion of stars.
“Peter van de Kamp was one
of the first to push this work
down to much cooler and less
massive stars,” says Eric Jensen,
a professor of astronomy at
Swarthmore. “So the work that
he and others did at Sproul
Observatory over many years,
measuring orbits for systems
with low-mass stars, was fun-
damental for our understand-
ing of cool, red stars, which we
now know to be by far the most
common kind of stars.”This work led to 61 Cygni.
Van de Kamp and his graduate
student Kaj Strand first pro-
posed a planet in this binary
system in 1942, based on their
astrometry measurements. 61
Cygni A and B seemed to wob-
ble slightly as they orbited each
other, as if tugged by an unseenobject. Van de Kamp added to
his planetary claims in 1951,
this time announcing a pro-
posed planet around Lalande
21185 with graduate student
Sarah Lee Lippincott.
But 1963 saw van de Kamp’s
most explosive announcement:There was a planet around
Barnard’s Star, an M dwarf just
6 light-years away. It was a cold,
inhospitable planet larger than
Jupiter, in a 12-year orbit. Later,
van de Kamp added a Saturn-
sized world in a 20-year orbit,
based on further assessment of
the star’s motions.
“His work was focused on
measuring the orbits of stars,”
Jensen says. “But once you
measure an orbit, you get
masses for the orbiting object.
And he thought he had found,
from the orbit he measured for
Barnard’s Star, that it implied
an orbiting companion of plan-
etary mass.”
A 1966 paper on interstellar
travel focusing on Barnard’s
Star kicked off what became
Project Daedalus, one of the
first modern engineering stud-
ies into interstellar travel within
a human lifetime. A robotic
probe would use nuclear explo-
sions to propel a spacecraft
toward Barnard’s Star at
12 percent the speed of light.
But by 1973, a new view on
these planets was emerging:
Sproul Observatory’s telescope
was f lawed, and none of the
planets actually existed.
Specifically, the photographic
plates were underexposed, and
when the telescope was cali-
brated a certain way, some stars
appeared to move artificially.Thomas Jefferson Jackson SeeSarah Lee LippincottPeter van de KampALL ILLUSTRATIONS:
ASTRONOMY
: KELLIE JAEGER