R. Paul Butler

What gets me about Paul Butler is how unglamorous the work is relative to the stakes. He and his team found more than half of the planets known to orbit nearby stars, which is to say he has done as much as anyone alive to answer whether we are alone. Yet there is no celebrity gloss here, just a San Diego kid out of San Francisco State who learned to read the faint wobble of distant suns. The Henry Draper Medal confirms it, but the patience behind it is what I admire. He turns silence in the data into addresses for new worlds.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

R. Paul Butler

Name (Japanese)

ポール・バトラー

Reading

ぽーる・ばとらー

Born

1960

Origin

San Diego, California, United States

Occupation

astronomer

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Rat

University

San Francisco State University

Awards & achievements

• 2001 Henry Draper Medal
• 2002 Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• Official sitehttps://epl.carnegiescience.edu/people/r-paul-butler
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.%20Paul%20Butler
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9D%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%83%90%E3%83%88%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%20(%E5%A4%A9%E6%96%87%E5%AD%A6%E8%80%85)
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1387698

Tags

• California
• astronomer

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.