50 Years Ago an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought) | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

50 Years Ago an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought) | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network:

"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."

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