IT WAS David Latham's misfortune that his email was time-stamped l April 1988. An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was engaged in the then faintly disreputable task of searching for planets orbiting other stars. As he excitedly wrote to a colleague, he had found something: a body orbiting an ordinary yellow star, known only by its catalogue designation HD114762, some 130 light years from Earth. For Latham's peers, this was nothing more than an April Fool. If the object had been a planet, it would have gone against all we thought we knew about how planets -and indeed solar systems - could look.
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