"Allen Steele - Coyote 01 - Coyote" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

evolve around the hot vents of volcanic fracture zones, it seemed unlikely that many of them would
eventually develop into something greater. Not impossible, by any stretch of the imagination, just. . .
improbable. Faith and wishful thinking were not enough; although the Drake Equation maintained that the
universe was filled with life, the Fermi Paradox posed a question that no one had yet been able to
answer.

During the last months of 1995, two astronomers from San Francisco State University, Geoffery Marcy
and Paul Butler, were engaged in the search for extrasolar planets by carefully observing stars through
infrared inferometry to see if they displayed regular shifts in their apparent magnitude, which in turn would
indicate the gravitational influence of a large body nearby. This technique had recently allowed
astronomers at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland to detect a gas giant closely orbiting 51 Pegasi, a
G-type star fifty light-years from Earth; now Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler, working with the 120-inch
telescope at Lick Observatory outside San Jose, were hoping to find more.

Their efforts paid off in January 1996, when the planet hunters publicly announced the confirmed
discovery of a giant planet revolving around 47 Ursae Majoris, a type-GO star 46 l.y.s from Earth.
Direct observation of the new world was still impossible, yet judging from its effects upon its primary,
Marcy and Butler were able to determine that 47 Ursae Majoris B was a gas giant three times the mass
of Jupiter, and that it occupied a nearly circular orbit 2. astronomical units from its sun. Compared to 51
Pegasi B, a planet 0.6 joves in mass yet located only .05 A.U.s from its primary, 47 Uma B was an
almost textbook example of what a gas giant should look like. A normal planet, if such an astounding
discovery could be classified as normal.

The announcement made the front pages of newspapers across the world before it gradually faded from
the public consciousness. During the following year Marcy and Butler would duplicate their success by
locating more planets in orbit around Tau Bootis A, Upsilon Andromedae, and Rho Coronae Borealis.
By May 2000, over forty extrasolar planets had been discovered, some of them so exotic as to make 47
Ursae Majoris B mundane by comparison. Yet 47 Uma B remained of interest to exobiologists because
its orbit lay just beyond what many astronomers considered to be the тАЬhabitable zone,тАЭ the approximate
distance a planet would revolve around its sun in order for it to support life. According to that theory, 47
Uma B was just a little too far away from its primary for it to be habitable, yet astrophysicists at
Pennsylvania State University postulated that if the superjovian had its own satellite system, infrared
radiation reflected from the gas giant might possibly render one or two of those moons capable of
supporting life.

Five years later, in August 2001, Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of a second gas giant
orbiting 47 Ursae Majoris, this one less massive and farther away from its primary. With the discovery of
47 Ursae Majoris C, humankind had evidence of a solar system that closely resembled EarthтАЩs.

Concurrent with the discovery of extrasolar planets, new interest was emerging among physicists and
astronautical engineers in the idea of interstellar travel. During 1997 and 1998, NASA sponsored two
academic conferences on the subject; one concentrated on breakthrough propulsion systems, the other
on robotic probes. Although conference participants often held wildly different opinions on when and
how spacecraft could be sent beyond EarthтАЩs solar system, the consensus that emerged was that
interstellar travel, while perhaps unlikely in the near term, was not impossible.

Early in the twenty-first century NASA launched the Sagan Terrestrial Planet Finder, an array of four
eight-meter optical telescopes positioned in low-Earth orbit by two successive shuttle missions. Once the
TPF was bought on-line, researchers at CalTechтАЩs Jet Propulsion Laboratory began pointing the
instrument toward those stars believed to have extrasolar planets. To no oneтАЩs great surprise, it turned