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Borenstein, pressing his interrogation, “there are about 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. If you’re looking at 150,000 stars, and found 1,200 with planets, and 54 of those in the habitable zone … that means …” The reporter stared at the ceiling, wheels turning in his mind. Borucki looked on, politely. “… there should be something like 50 billion planets in our galaxy, right? And 500 million should be in the habitable zone.”
    Borucki thought about that for a moment. “Yes, that sounds right,” he answered.
    Two weeks earlier, Borucki had talked about a hypothetical four hundred thousand planets that could be detectable from Earth. Now, under intense, though friendly, questioning, he was admitting to five hundred million overall. Borenstein hadhis story. Later that day, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, a blog that aggregates and reviews science stories, described it this way:
    Seth says 50 billion planets, minimum, in Milky Way. Nobody said that at the press conference. Minor consternation ensued among other reporters after he filed. How’d he get that angle? Explanation: Seth missed the press conference. Saw Borucki afterward talking with a few reporters including Michael Lemonick of
Time
. “Just a nice chat where you riff together,” Borenstein says. Borucki says one in two stars has planets, Seth says let’s do the math, Borucki complies and double checks, and that’s why it can pay to be there in the flesh.
    This remark about the flesh may well have been a dig at media outlets that are no longer willing to pay for reporters to go to conferences. The author of the blog post, Charles Petit, covered science for the
San Francisco Chronicle
for years, and takes a dim view of how his profession has been downsized. Still, the calculation done by the AP reporter was so simple and obvious that Borucki could easily have done it for the other reporters who were present, and for the hundreds more who get NASA press releases by e-mail. He could have done it for the press conference two weeks earlier.
    The fact that he hadn’t says a lot about Bill Borucki. Some astronomers are showmen—Neil deGrasse Tyson is a good example. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, is a serious and highly respected scientist, but he’salso a frequent guest of both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. When he taught at Princeton (he had a part-time appointment to the faculty there for many years), his dynamic lectures drew students by the hundreds. Tyson is a tall, powerfully built man in his forties, a former athlete and dancer who once told me that “in high school, I was a nerd, but a nerd who could kick your butt.” I once saw him at an astronomy conference striding across the hotel lobby in a form-fitting black workout outfit, complete with weightlifting gloves—a ninja astronomer heading for the gym. Every eye in the place followed him.
    That makes Bill Borucki the anti-Tyson. He’s in his early seventies, below average in height, with thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He speaks softly where Tyson booms, and he pauses before he answers a question, where Tyson fires rapidly. Borucki wouldn’t do well on
The Colbert Report
. His talks are generally delivered in a thoughtful, measured tone, without laugh lines or oratorical fireworks. Bill Borucki would look ridiculous in a black workout suit. Wearing a coat and tie, as he was when Borenstein cornered him after the Washington press conference, he could be mistaken for an accountant. In the more relaxed atmosphere of a recent astronomy conference, he ambled through the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle in a green windbreaker, looking like someone Hollywood might have cast as the clerk at an old-fashioned hardware store. Tyson grew up on New York’s Upper West Side; he has an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D. from