Wolszczan

Many years ago, as I was writing up my thesis, my advisor burst into my office with the hot news. Someone had announced a possible discovery of an extrasolar planet! It seems strange now, but back then we really did not know if there were any other planets around other stars. A lot of astronomers thought that it was quite likely that there were planets around other stars, maybe even most stars, but we had no data. We were getting there, there were astrometric and radial velocity searches underway, with people like Walker, Griffin and Latham developing techniques which would clearly,…