[caption id="attachment_12617" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Barnard's Star moves across the night sky. Courtesy Steve Quirk."] [/caption]In April 1963, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson, Ariz., Peter van de Kamp made what should have been a landmark announcement. By tracking the motion of a dim, nearby star across the night sky, he had uncovered an unseen object tugging ever so slightly on the star and perturbing its motion--an exoplanet , well before that became a household word. The gravitational perturbation was so subtle that van de Kamp, a Dutch-born astronomer at Swarthmore College, had relied on almost 50 years of telescope observations to build his case for the planet orbiting what is known as Barnard's Star. [More]






Source: 50 Years Ago, an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought)