Far from Home

Three years later, a team of Swiss astronomers led by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz scooped the Canadians, announcing the detection of a planet with the same mass as Jupiter orbiting the star 51 Pegasi. One hundred ninety-nine exoplanets have been discovered since, all but a handful using variations on the precision radial-vel­ocity technique. One of these planets orbits Gamma Cephei, just as Campbell and Walker suspected. “Everyone in the field recognizes that Campbell and Walker were the first ones to see evidence for a planet around a sun-like star in 1992,” Matthews says. “Bruce and Gordon could legitimately have gone out and told everybody they’d found a planet, and the history books might look a little bit different.” He sighs. “But being good scientists—and maybe being conservative Canadians—they didn’t make the proclamation that it was definitely a planet.”

Matthews, who was a post-doctoral fellow during the Campbell-Walker study, falls uncharacteristically silent. “To be honest,” he says at last, “it was me who pointed out that the star had this independent signal that was the same as the radial-velocity signal.” He was uncertain whether they were looking at a star with a planet around it or the star’s natural turbulence. “I am probably the one to blame for them not making a more definitive announcement.”

“The next thing I observed is the essence, or substance, of the Milky Way. With a telescope this can be perceived so palpably that all the disputes that have tormented philosophers for so many centuries are quashed by sheer ocular proof, and we are released from all those wordy arguments.” —Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (1610)

Matthews regains his verbal momentum as he walks across campus. He moves like a truck, belly out front like a grille. After marching up the steps of the dirty white stucco building that houses the ubc astronomy department, he is hailed by everyone in the most office.

The idea for most was born in the summer of 1996. Matthews was at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society when he noticed a science fair—style poster about a Mississauga company that had developed a way to stabilize very small satellites. The company, Dynacon, was seeking a way to prove its new technology.

That night, he and the poster’s author, Slavek Rucinski of the University of Toronto, debated the prospects of a suitcase-sized observatory that would measure the microvariability and oscillations of stars from orbit—sidestepping the problem of peering through the Earth’s grimy “windows” by essentially lifting the telescope off the bus. Together with Dr. Tony Moffat of l’Université de Montréal, Matthews and Rucinski drafted a proposal to the Canadian Space Agency and won the right to launch Canada’s first science satellite in more than thirty years.

The satellite was built to carry a telescope with a 15-centimetre aperture backed by a camera with two ccd (charge-coupled device) image sensors. Matthews flew to Russia and negotiated a launch at a cut-rate price aboard a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile (icbm), and on June 30, 2003, the tiny 60 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm satellite was launched from the formerly top-secret Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 800 kilometres north of Moscow. The icbm carried most up to an altitude of 820 kilometres and released it into a polar orbit.

The satellite travels at about 27,000 kilometres per hour, circling the planet every hundred minutes. Whereas terrestrial telescopes can observe only from sundown to sunrise, most can observe a target star continuously for up to sixty days before the Earth’s hor­izon gets in the way. The observatory then radios its data to modest ground stations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Vien­na. The Vancouver outpost is nothing more than two desktop computers connected to a single rack of electronic components, served by a 2.5-metre satellite dish on the roof of the ubc physics and astronomy building.

Far from finding a sky filled with stars like the sun, most has revealed a strikingly diverse universe in which there may be no two stars that are exactly alike. Matthews smirks as he notes that it looks as though the project’s lifespan will extend to “a five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations....” He interrupts himself to hum the Star Trek theme.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about most is its price tag. While the costs of other “low-budget” space missions are typically counted in the hundreds of millions, the total for the most mission is a mere $10 million—about the price of a waterfront home near ubc. “When I talk to American colleagues and people at the Space Telescope Science Institute at nasa, they can’t get their heads around the fact that we did a mission for essentially [what was then] $7 million US,” Matthews says. In a poke at nasa’s $3-billion Hubble Space Telescope, he calls most the “Humble Space Telescope.