Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 26, 1994                   TAG: 9402260137
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

EUREKA! SCIENTISTS FIND 2 PLANETS ORBITING OUTSIDE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

A scientist says he's confirmed the existence of two planets orbiting a dense star in the Milky Way Galaxy. They would be the first known planets outside our own solar system.

"The thing, to me at least, is a clear-cut case," Alexander Wolszczan of Pennsylvania State University said Friday. Other scientists also called the new data convincing.

In 1992, Wolszczan and a colleague said they had found evidence that at least two planets were orbiting an extremely dense star called a pulsar about 1,300 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

One planet appeared to contain 2.8 times the mass of the Earth and orbit the pulsar every 98.2 days, at about half the distance between the Earth and sun. The other planet, with at least 3.4 times Earth's mass, appeared to orbit every 66.6 days at just over one-third the distance between the Earth and sun.

The planets have not been seen directly. But the pulsar sends energy pulses toward Earth, and the evidence for the planets lay in irregularities in the pattern of those pulses. Those irregularities appeared to be caused by the pulsar's being pulled to and fro by the gravity of orbiting planets, the scientists said.

Wolszczan had said more study of the irregularities should show that the planets are tugging gravitationally on each other and so altering their orbits.

Friday, he said such evidence had been found and it "confirms that what we see are planet-sized objects."

Shri Kulkarni, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, called the new findings scientifically convincing and a triumph for the proposal that the planets exist.

The data also reveals a moon-sized object orbiting nearer the pulsar, and there may be still more orbiting objects, Wolszczan said. "It sort of looks like a full-blown planetary system around that star," he said.