I'm tucking in to dinner with astronomer Alexander Wolszczan in a bustling bistro near his office at Penn State, and he's in a cheerfully gloomy frame of mind. He has reason enough to be gloomy. He discovered the first planets beyond our solar system but gets little recognition. His follow-up research has been slow and painstaking, hitting repeated dead ends. Neither of these things seems to bother him in the least, however. No, what puts Wolszczan in his intriguingly contradictory mood are the planets themselves. Earth leads a charmed existence, circling a stable sun that provides just the right amount of warmth for life. The planets that Wolszczan found 22 years ago aren't so lucky. They orbit a pulsar - a tiny, rapidly spinning stellar cinder that blasts them with ferocious surges of radiation. "There could be a permanent aurora lighting up the sky there from the wind of particles from the pulsar. Some of those particles could get down to the surface and blast it smooth," he says. And the misery of the planets' current existence pales in comparison with their traumatic birth, in the 100-billion-degree debris from a supernova that shredded most of the original star.
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