Planet stages a comeback.

It's a planet after all.

One year ago, David F. Gray of the University of Western Ontario in London disputed the notion that the nearby, sunlike star 51 Pegasi has an unseen companion orbiting it (SN: 3/l/97, p. 133). Two teams had previously reported that certain wavelengths of light absorbed by the star shift periodically to redder and bluer wavelengths, indicating that a planet about half the mass of Jupiter is making the star wobble back and forth.

Gray, however, claimed that a more subtle feature, the shape of an absorption peak, varied along with the wavelength and that both characteristics could result only from some sort of oscillation intrinsic to the star--not from the tug of a planet.

Gray now reports in the Jan. 8 Nature that his latest observations show no evidence of a change in the absorption peak. In light of two other reports that also find no such feature, he agrees that the signal he originally detected was probably spurious. Artie P. Hatzes, William D. Cochran, and Eric J. Bakker of the University of Texas at Austin report their findings in the same issue of Nature. Timothy M. Brown of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and his colleagues, including Scott D. Horner of Pennsylvania State University in College Park, detail their results in the Feb. 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"It's a letdown," says Gray, "that we don't really have interesting [stellar] oscillations to analyze. But what the heck, the guys who study planets will be happy."