The Exoplanet That Wasn’t

The Exoplanet That Wasn’t

On today’s date (July 24) in 1991, British physicist Andrew Lyne claimed to have discovered the first planet outside our solar system—an Earth-shattering announcement following centuries of inquiry into the mysterious depths of space. Lyne, a researcher at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues had turned their attention to a pulsar, the remnant of a huge, dead star, which regularly blasts beams of radiation. After noticing weird shift…