8DETECTING DISTANT EXOPLANETS
Extrasolar planets, called exoplanets for short, are planets that orbit alien suns. By the end of 2019, more than 4,000 exoplanets had been discovered. That’s an average of 150 per year since the first confirmed discovery in 1992! These days, finding a faraway planet seems as easy as catching a cold, yet it took almost all human history—up to 1930—to discover the eight planets, plus Pluto, that make up our own solar system.
Astronomers detected the first exoplanets by observing gravitationally induced wobble in the motion of stars. Today, they rely mainly on the slight dimming of a star’s light as the exoplanet passes ...
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