Interview with Tom Standage - Author of 'The Neptune File'

Adams was the first of the two mathematicians to determine the position of the planet Neptune, whose mass was gravitationally deflecting Uranus from its predicted course through the skies. Neptune was, in other words, found indirectly, as a result of its gravitational influence on another body. And that's how planets are being detected around other stars today: from the wobbles they cause in the stars' motions. So there's a direct link between the two. The Neptune discovery was a prototype of the modern discoveries, the first of which was made in 1995.

In the book you describe how the scientific establishment in England didn't offer Adams much support in his research. Do you think much has changed in the last 150 years?

It's tempting to put Adams down as one of those unlucky Britons who have a brilliant idea and are then ignored by the establishment. There are plenty of examples in the history of science and technology of ideas that are dreamed up in Britain only to be exploited elsewhere. But I think Adams was just unlucky. He was a very modest chap, not at all pushy, which meant he found it hard to convince Airy about his new-planet theory, particularly since it was an idea Airy had already rejected.

Are today's planet-hunters mavericks like their earlier counterparts?

They used to be. In the early 1990s, planet hunting was regarded as a very dubious field, and those working in it were regarded with disdain by other astronomers. It was like saying you were working on perpetual motion, or trying to make contact with aliens. Planet hunters had to say that they were researching "sub-stellar" companions to other stars, or that they were interested in brown dwarfs, in order to disguise what they were doing. But since the discovery of the first planets orbiting other stars, things have changed a great deal, and it's now one of the sexiest fields in modern science.

Last year in The Economist you reported that planet-hunters had located 12 new planets. Are we likely to start getting blasé about these new discoveries?

We are already. Eleven more planets were announced in April this year, bringing the total to over 60, and it hardly generated any press coverage. In a sense, this is understandable; it's hard to get excited about something you can't see. If you're told it's there, but just hasn't been seen yet, you shrug, like people did when Adams claimed to have found Neptune. But when we get the first image of an extrasolar planet, sometime in the next decade, that will be front-page news. And the first picture of an Earth-like planet will probably become an iconic image.