"When I look at the stars at night and see stars like ours, to me that means billions of opportunities for life," says Debra Fischer, in a firm, gentle voice.
Sweet-faced and brown-eyed, Fischer has been called a planet hunter, a term she finds lacking. She prefers the old-fashioned moniker: astronomer. She is, indisputably, a planet finder.
At Lick Observatory in California, the UC Berkeley researcher monitors 300 stars for suspicious behavior that would betray nearby planets. Her teammates in Hawaii and Australia track 600 more. A Swiss team, the first earthlings to detect a foreign planet, keeps tabs on 1,000.
Peculiar, super-sized planets are popping up all over.
Most of the 30 new planets found since 1995 are "only children." The star Upsilon Andromedae has a brood of three. And at least two other stars hint at sheltering a pair. But to say that these small families of mammoth planets represent normalcy is akin to casting a tuna net into the ocean, and then declaring that all fish are large. The holes in the planet-nets of Fischer and her colleagues are simply too big to catch small planets.
"Right now, we couldn't detect our own Jupiter," she says. "We're never going to find an Earth-sized planet."
The net is actually a web of mathematics and astronomical observations. Although a Scottish astronomer now claims to have detected actual starlight reflecting off the surface of a planet, these new worlds are generally too dim to be anything like visible.
But their effect on their parent stars is, mathematically, detectable. Our sun exhibits the same suspicious behavior that the planet finders hope for.
