BERKELEY — Night after night, as his parents slept, Geoff Marcy clambered out of his bedroom window and onto his San Fernando Valley rooftop to gaze at Saturn's shifting moons through a used 4 1/4-inch telescope. He was 14 and he was obsessed.
As he peered into the skies over Granada Hills in the late 1960s, he was driven by the age-old questions that animated the science fiction he devoured: Were there other planets out there, beyond the nine circling our own sun? Were there other Earths teeming with life? Marcy was certain there were.
His instincts would take him on a lonely, 30-year odyssey from a $50 rooftop telescope to the world's most powerful astronomical machines as he struggled to tease out the slow, telltale wobbles of stars dancing with planets some 200 light-years from Earth.
Marcy, now 46, has become the world's most successful planet hunter. Not only has he found more planets than anyone else, he also has discovered a systematic, almost easy way to find them. In doing so, he has conferred legitimacy on a field of inquiry once regarded by his colleagues as a crackpot pursuit, because planets beyond our solar system couldn't be seen even with the brawniest of telescopes.
Thanks to the techniques he and a partner pioneered, 67 extrasolar planets have been discovered so far, with dozens more "maybes" under scrutiny.
"We've got planetary systems coming out of our ears," Marcy said after a recent all-night planet hunting session in Hawaii at the world's largest optical telescope, the Keck. "Planet hunting has morphed from the magnificent to the mundane."
Today, the boy who found inspiration in the made-up worlds of science fiction is celebrated as a Marco Polo of contemporary astronomy. But before he began conjuring new planets out of the darkness of deep space, Marcy had to learn what it was like to be invisible himself, to spend decades laboring on the margins of acceptability, scoffed at by the scientists he had admired for years.
"They wanted to know if I was going to discover pyramid power while I was at it," Marcy said. "It was a little too close to little green men and ESP."
The search for new planets has consumed the lives of astronomers since the time of the ancient Greeks. An Italian monk, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting the presence of "countless Earths."
