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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Episode 1254
Dune. Star Wars. Alien. Science fiction movies love alien worlds, and so do we. But how do scientists find planets outside our solar system in real life? One way is by looking for the stars that wiggle. Historically, astronomers have measured those wiggles via the Doppler method, carefully analyzing how the star's light shifts. Thanks to new data from the GAIA telescope, scientists have a much better picture of distant stars' wiggles — and the exoplanets that cause them.
Want to hear more about exoplanet discoveries? Send us an email at shortwave@npr.org.
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Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago