David Kipping

Yeah.

I mean, if you've spent, it's hard, right?

If you've spent 20 years of your life, you know, most of your academic career studying this one thing.

It's really hard to turn around and say, you know what, I screwed up.

The last 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong, and I have to eat humble pie.

That's not easy.

But it has happened in some cases.

One of my favorite stories about this is the first exoplanet that was ever claimed, a planet around another star.

one of the first ones, it was wrong.

So it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it, on a six-month orbital period, so exactly half the Earth's orbital period around the sun.

And they saw this signal in their data, this pulsating star was doing something weird, and they figured out there was a six-month period around it.

So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer, and he realized later on it was wrong.

And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital eccentricity of the Earth.

So the Earth is not on a circular orbit.

Its eccentricity is 0.0167.

It's a tiny number.

But that number hadn't been accounted for in the calculation.

And so he had to stand up in front of...

Hundreds of astronomers at this famous IOU meeting.

And he admitted he was wrong.