Exoplanet becomes center of epic astronomical controversy

Wired : In astronomy, as in so many endeavors, there is a race to be first. Case in point: Gliese 667Cc, an extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, orbiting the star Gliese 667C. Although fairly universally recognized as one of the first, if not the first, Earth-like exoplanets to be discovered, Gliese 667Cc is at the center of a scientific controversy over who discovered it. A European team, using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), published the first paper in November 2011. However, researcher Guillem Anglada-Escudé, who used archived HARPS data, claims he saw it first in August 2011 but was scooped after applying to HARPS to use its spectrograph to verify his findings. Anglada-Escudé also had been working with a group of American researchers who were trying to be the first to discover such an exoplanet. In this article for Wired, author Lee Billings, who wrote Five Billion Years of Solitude (Current, 2013), which covers the topic of the hunt for exoplanets in greater detail, provides an informative discussion of the complex thread of events leading up to the discovery of possibly the first Earth-like planet in outer space.