Marcy, Geoffrey

Geoffrey Marcy, byname of Geoffrey William Marcy, (born September 29, 1954, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, U.S.), American astronomer whose use of Doppler shifts to detect extrasolar planets led to the discovery of several hundred planetary bodies in multiple star systems.

Marcy was raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles. When he was 14, his mother, an anthropologist, and his father, an aerospace engineer, bought him a telescope, engendering an early interest in astronomy. Marcy received a bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976. In 1982 he earned a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 1982 to 1984 he studied at the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas observatories in Pasadena, California, having received a Carnegie fellowship from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.

After deciding to devote himself to searching for extrasolar planets in 1983, the next year he moved on to a professorship at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where he recruited a graduate student, Paul Butler, to help him develop instrumentation that would be sensitive enough to indicate the presence of such faraway objects. His colleagues thought him foolish to spend time on what they considered a futile pursuit, questioning the very existence of such bodies as well as the feasibility of detecting them. Though no telescope was powerful enough to see such a planet directly, Marcy was intrigued by the theory, put forth by Canadian astronomer Gordon Walker, that a large planet might exert enough gravitational force on its star that the star would move slightly. This motion, referred to as a “wobble,” would reveal itself as a slight shift in the wavelengths of light traveling from the star to Earth. Eventually Marcy and Butler refined a light analyzer that could detect such shifts.

Using this technique, two Swiss scientists, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, in 1995 became the first astronomers to detect a planet circling a star outside Earth’s solar system. Marcy confirmed their discovery, and the following year he and Butler discovered two more extrasolar planets. A succession of similar discoveries followed. In 1999 Marcy found a star with a wobble that suggested a huge planet would pass directly in front of the star and thereby block some of the star’s light, and on November 7 of that year one of his colleagues noted a 1.7 percent decline in the brightness of the star at exactly the time Marcy had predicted. That year he and his colleagues also discovered the first extrasolar multiple planet system, orbiting the star Upsilon Andromedae in the Andromeda constellation. As a reward for his groundbreaking research, Marcy was appointed a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999 and accepted an invitation to head the university’s Center for Integrative Planetary Science, which was founded in 2001. He remained as an adjunct professor at San Francisco State. However, amid allegations of sexual harassment, he resigned from Berkeley in 2015, and that year SFSU terminated his position.

Marcy and his team continued to refine the precision of their light detector, reducing the Doppler shift precision of the instrument from around 15 metres/second in 1995 to 1 metre/second in 2005. The exactitude of the measurements made it increasingly likely that a planet similar to Earth in size though orbiting much closer to its star than Earth’s distance from the Sun could be detected. In June of that year the team announced that they had been able to perceive a planet that was the smallest yet, approximately seven times the mass of Earth. In 2009 Marcy, who had discerned many of the almost 150 exoplanets to his credit by using the telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, combined forces with NASA’s Kepler mission. The Kepler telescope, mounted on a satellite, transmitted information on candidates for Earth-sized planets back to Marcy and his team, who then used the Keck telescopes to obtain further information and investigate the exoplanet’s similarity to Earth.

In April 2000 Marcy was named California Scientist of the Year. He was presented with the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 2003 and received the Shaw Foundation Prize in 2005.