Tucked into a hazy, tree-lined street is an unassuming bungalow like any other. There’s not even a sign out front. But what goes on inside has caught the attention of astronomers, scientists and press from around the world. One of about half a dozen businesses in the building, in a tiny office on the top floor, a young woman astronomer is on the verge of making history.
Susan Terebey, president of the Extrasolar Research Corp., believes she has found the first planet outside Earth’s solar system.
Officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration call her finding “historic” and “a watershed event.” They say the discovery could dramatically alter theories about how planets are formed and how our solar system came to be. It could also open the door to finding life on another planet.
With pictures from the Hubble space telescope, Terebey and her team of four identified the planet in the constellation Taurus, 450 light-years from Earth. Called TMR-1C until it is confirmed, it is thought to be two to three times the size of Jupiter and far too hot and gaseous to support life.
Using Hubble’s multimillion-dollar infrared camera, Terebey captured an image of a pair of binary stars (which circle each other) and a third object at the end of a long filament of light. The picture suggests this candidate planet was hurled into space by the two parent stars like a slingshot.
In the past, scientists have been able to infer the presence of more than a dozen planets by subtle wobbles in the motion of stars, but none has been photographed directly.
If her discovery is confirmed, its implications are dramatic, scientists say. Her results suggest that it may be easier to form planets around binary stars than previously thought. And though scientists have long held that it takes millions of years for planets to form, Terebey’s results suggest that it may happen much more quickly.
“It’s an incredible image,” says Ed Weiler, associate administrator for space science at NASA. “If it is proved to be correct, it is the first observation ever of an extra-solar planet. This is history. We live in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars. That’s a stepping stone to answering the big question, Are we alone out there?”
Last May, Terebey teamed up with NASA to hold a press conference announcing her findings. The decision to go public triggered huge media interest and criticism from some colleagues who thought the announcement was premature and overly hyped. Some were indignant that her results were released before proper peer review and publication in a respected science journal.
But Weiler says an official confirmation could not be made at the time of the press conference because TMR-1C was behind the sun and scientists could not analyze its light spectrum. NASA and Terebey moved so quickly, he says, because some of her findings had been leaked on the Internet and they wanted to make the announcement through official channels to head off inaccurate press reports.
Terebey “took a big chance,” Weiler says. “We, NASA, did a peer review. We got about five or six people around the table and grilled her for two hours on her interpretation. We gave her a chance to wait three or four months and she said, `No, these are compelling data.’ I knew she was going to be fed to the sharks. Suddenly she went from obscurity to appearing on national TV plus the front page of every newspaper in the country.”
As she works to confirm her observations, Terebey stands at the edge of an academic precipice: a woman in a competitive and predominantly male field on the cusp of something big. And there is a chance the object will turn out to be a brown dwarf (a star that failed to support nuclear fusion) or a background star.
“I just try to keep a sense of humor about it. What else can I do? I feel like I’m way out there on a limb and I just have to stay out there on the edge of that limb for a long time and see what happens,” she says.
A quiet and modest woman, Terebey, 43, appears at odds with the flurry she has created. In khaki pants, a black shirt and little makeup, she looks more salt of the earth than media darling. Although her head is in the cosmos most of the day, her life is far more terrestrial. It is the science, the writing of grant proposals and the raising of her two daughters, she says, that occupy her thoughts, and not becoming a national hero.
Born in Canada, Terebey moved to New Jersey at the age of 1 with her parents, both of whom were refugees in World War II. Her father worked as a carpenter and her mother as a deli manager in the local supermarket while raising Terebey and her three older brothers.
Terebey received her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. It didn’t take long for her to recognize the scarcity of women in her field.
“I remember, at the end of college, deciding whether to go on to graduate school. (I was) looking around at all the professors and feeling I wasn’t like them at all. I didn’t see myself as growing up to be like them,” she says.
In 1984 she received a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and went on to complete fellowships at observatories in the United States and Canada. She says it was a junior high science teacher and her three older brothers, all of whom were interested in science, who triggered her interest in the field. She remembers no women mentors or scientists in her college years.
“Somewhere in graduate school I totaled up the women whom I had had as teachers,” she says. “I had a woman golf instructor and a woman graduate student lecturer who taught Russian.”
Women astronomers make up just 5 percent of the full professor or senior research positions at the country’s leading astronomy universities and institutions, according to a 1992 study by the Space Telescope Science Institute, an astronomical research center in Baltimore.
Terebey may be a minority, but she holds her own among the granddaddies of the field, her woman colleagues say.
“I thought her soft-spoken nature actually made her arguments more compelling — you know, walk softly and carry a big stick,” says Anne Kinney, a research astronomer who participated in the press conference with Terebey. “Susan is very strong willed. She may be soft spoken, but she’s not someone you push around by any means. She’s very determined, very hard working and focused.”
After seven years as a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Terebey took the unusual step of breaking out on her own and forming the private Extrasolar Research Corp. in 1996, a move that made sense to her as a mother and wife in a two-astronomer family. Her husband, Dave Van Buren, is an astronomer at Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and project scientist on the Space Interferometry Mission, a large telescope system to be launched in 2005 that will map the positions of stars more accurately and probe for other planets.
“This is a good place for me now. The problem is you can’t just pick up and move when your profession demands it. I’ve had nice job offers that I ended up turning down because I couldn’t find anything reasonable for my husband,” she says.
Finding her place in a field dominated by men, however, has had its ups and downs.
“You stand out more” as a woman, she says. “People are more likely to remember you. The disadvantages are that there are some fraction of people (with whom) it’s very difficult to gain any credibility with no matter what you do. Or else you have to prove yourself 10 times over.”
And proving herself is exactly what Terebey has set out to do. In September, she and her colleagues traveled to the giant Keck II telescope in Hawaii to take another look at TMR-1C and to gather more data by looking at the light spectrum. She plans to publish those results before spring.
One way to make her case would be to find similar scenarios in the sky, thus showing that these formations are more common than we thought. It will take a while, possibly as long as three to five years, for scientific opinion to weigh in, she says.
“I’m confident that either this or something very similar is going to be found in the next five years,” she says. “We have this idea for how we make isolated planets: They get ejected from binary systems. The physics behind that is very solid. Finding one more puts us on a path to saying that it’s easy to form planets. That’s the question everyone has.”
But not everyone is convinced. Shrinivas Kulkarni, professor of astronomy and planetary science at Cal Tech and an old friend of Terebey’s, says her findings are too speculative.
“My view is great discoveries need great proof. If you want to make a big claim, you need really good data. In spite of the fact that Sue and I are friends, it’s hardly there,” says Kulkarni, who was credited with the discovery of the first brown dwarf in 1995.
When it comes to speculating about life on other planets, she’ll only go as far as saying that today’s advanced technology will allow scientists to have new and improved ways to look for it.
“My subjective feeling is that if we actually find a lot of objects similar to this, it means that it’s very easy to form planets. Then we can hope that means it’s easier to form habitable planets,” she says.
Until Terebey’s discovery is confirmed, her colleagues can only speculate on her place in history.
“If this is confirmed, it will be an enormous discovery,” says Meg Urry, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and expert on the topic of women in astronomy. “Women have made very important contributions to astronomy already, but we’re still an enormously small minority. I think (Terebey) would be a role model, particularly for young women.”
For her part, Terebey insists she’s just a researcher determined to understand the birth and life of stars, not to become one.
“I really fundamentally am a scientist,” she says. “I expect the next five years to provide an incredible amount of new information. But I’m not thinking about the history books.”
