Topic > Detecting New Planets - 572

Over the past decade, scientists have discovered hundreds of new planets, some of them as habitable as Earth. There are two methods that scientists use to discover these planets. The first method is called Photometric Transit or “wink” method. This method relies primarily on a planet's orbit around the disk of its parent star in our line of sight. The other method, used by most scientists, is called the oscillation method. Through this method, we predict the presence of planets based on the effect they have on the star they orbit. Planets outside our solar system are called exoplanets. Most exoplanets are found using the wobble method. With this method, scientists look for stars that appear to wobble due to the gravitational pull of their orbiting planets. This is an indirect method in which the existence of planets is inferred due to the displacement or imbalance of the star around which they rotate. Using the Doppler effect, we can tell if a star has a planet revolving around it by looking at its spectrum. If the spectrum fluctuates continuously from high to low f...