Review: Accidental Astronomy

by Jeff Foust
Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space
by Chris Lintott
Basic Books, 2024
hardcover, 320 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-5416-0541-1
US$30

People are usually taught a very formal, structured approach to science: researchers develop hypotheses based on existing data and then conduct experiments or observations to verify them. Reality, unsurprisingly, is messier: scientists make mistakes, experiments go awry, unexpected findings reshape an entire field. That is particularly true in astronomy, where the universe can throw observers a curveball, from a supernova explosion to an asteroid impact, without warning.

That randomness of the science of astronomy is the theme of Accidental Astronomy by Chris Lintott, an astronomer and science communicator. The book examines how those “random discoveries,” as the subtitle puts it, which include those discoveries of random events as well as discoveries made by astronomers who were looking for something else, have altered our understanding of the universe.

The book is best described as a collection of essays on various discoveries. The connective tissue among them is rather tenuous—the general theme of accidents and luck—and each chapter can stand on its own. Some examine famous accidental discoveries, like how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background while tracking down a persistent source of noise in a radio antenna. Others were false alarms, like a detection of a radio signal from Proxima Centauri in 2019 that raised hopes in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) community until followup observations concluded it was just interference: a search that instead found terrestrial intelligence. Falling in between the two is the surprise detection of phosphine, a potential biosignature, in the atmosphere of Venus, a discovery that others have not been able to replicate, at least not yet.

That randomness, and luck, can shape careers and the entire field. Lintott describes in one chapter the discovery of what would turn out to be pulsars in radio observations by Jocelyn Bell. To confirm that the repeating signal was real, a team at Cambridge University used another radio telescope to observe the source. At the time the source of the signal came into view of this telescope, there was… nothing. Five minutes later, though, the signal was detected: astronomers miscalculated when it would be visible.

“Jocelyn firmly believes that if the calculation had been off by, say, twenty-five minutes,” he writes, “everyone would have gone home convinced that the discovery was nothing more than a problem with the telescope hardware, and her career and astronomical history would have both taken a very different turn.” Even over the course of the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe, a few minutes can make all the difference.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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