This learn node points to a video lecture from Yale online: Discovering Exoplanets: Hot Jupiters. In the image above the shadow is from the hand of Yale Professor Charles Bailyn, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Astronomy who delivers this and other lecture videos that are part of the Yale University open courseware for the course: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics (Spring 2007). The course description says that:
Professor Bailyn explains how the outlook of our Solar System can predict what other star systems may look like. It is demonstrated how momentum equations are applied in astronomers’ search for exoplanets. Planet velocities are discussed and compared in relation to a planet’s mass. Finally, the Doppler shift is introduced and students learn how it is used to measure the velocity of distant objects, such as galaxies and planets.
A video titled Searching for Extrasolar Planets on the website of the American Museum of Natural History describes work begun there in 2003. The video’s webpage explains that:
Astrophysicists are discovering new extrasolar planets—those outside our Solar System—almost daily. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (originally called SIRTF, or the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) and AMNH’s Lyot Project Coronograph are two of the many technologies uncovering the attributes and evolution of these faraway worlds. The techniques employed by these instruments may one day help answer one of astronomy’s reigning mysteries: do any extrasolar planets host life?
A sample of the discoveries is a Spitzer Mission News report dated November 22, 2007: Youthful Star Sprouts Planets Early.
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