Comment I was there (Score 1) 43
At Caltech, I was the software developer working for Susan Terebey's husband and collaborator (himself formerly an astrophysicist, now a researcher at GE). We built software that performed volumetric ray-tracing using rules from particle physics to simulate radiative transfer (diffusion, recombination, etc.). We could simulate the output from Hubble's NICMOS camera in about 20 minutes on a mid-range Macintosh (of all things).
Dr. Terebey used this software, together with models of stellar evolution that she's been developing throughout her scientific career, and found that the simulated images matched actual observations amazingly closely. She obtained some more time on Hubble to study protostellar evolution. TMR-1 (Taurus Molecular Region 1) was one of the many things she observed, looking for insights into how stars form.
I'm a software developer who knows almost nothing of astronomy, but my understanding is that the Terebey-Shu-Cassen model of protostellar evolution is considered to be a defining work in the field. I.e., she's a respected and accomplished scientist.
Over dinner one August night, they showed these images to me and my wife. We oohed and aahed over this particular one (do so yourself at http://www.extrasolar.com/) but at the time everyone assumed it was just a star. It was only six months later, that Dr. Terebey determined this object was scientifically unusual. TMR-1C appeared to be ejected from the cluster -- which was interesting in its own right (to a scientist studying stellar evolution). But then it also appeared to be too cold and small to be a star.
Dr. Terebey and her husband considered a variety of possibile explanations (including that it was a background star, which they estimated at about a 2% chance). Like all good scientists, they considered all the possibilities, one of which was that the object might be a planet.
They were always very careful to point out that further study was needed (especially spectroscopic analysis to rule out the possibility of a background star) -- that being a planet was only one of many possible explanations -- and in fact it was Dr. Terebey herself who continued to study this object and eventually determined that it is most likely not a planet.
As with any NASA-funded study, NASA is automatically informed of the results, and NASA scientists inevitably also participate in the peer-review. Generally speaking, and in this particular case, it's not the scientist who calls the press conference, but the funding institute.
NASA jumped on the results like they did with the "microfossils" in the Mars rock. The press jumped on it like they did with that story and the one about Dolly, the cloned sheep.
You, gentle reader, probably found out about it through the fisheye lens of the media. I suppose that lends a certain sensationalism to it, but in reality it was just ordinary science.
Observations were made by an expert in the field, hypotheses considered and published in a peer-reviewed journal with those observations. Additional observations were performed, hypotheses rejected, published again. Pretty dull, actually, but apparently it can make good copy.
Not unlike a few recent software technologies.
Call me a disgruntled former employee if you will, but I think it's interesting how NASA never mentions the difficulties Dr. Terebey, a woman operating through her own self-owned small business, had to overcome to obtain funding through their bureaucracy. Science is increasingly a boys club for tenured university faculty.
Or how NASA exposes scientists to the media spotlight, without regard to what that exposure might do to their careers.
(And don't even get me started about how software development is done at NASA. If you ever wondered how they could ship an interface that was using metric on one end and British on the other, I could tell you enough stories that you'd stop wondering that, and start wondering how they ship anything that works at all!)
