
The First Exoplanet Claim: Captain William S Jacob
Published: September 24, 2026
Duration: 8:39
In 1855, Captain William Stephen Jacob authored a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society claiming that a planet likely existed in the binary star system 70 Ophiuchi. Although his claim ended being wrong, it's pretty remarkable that someone was even thinking about doing this with scientific methods at the time! Here we get into Jacob's claim, what went wrong, and what legacy this has left us with.
::More about this Video::
► Captain William S Jacob, "On Certain Anomalies Presented by the Binary Star 70 Ophiuchi": http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1855MNRAS..15..228J
► Information comp...