Search For Exoplanets: A Discussion With Professor Sara Seager

Search for Exoplanets: A Discussion with Professor Sara Seager

My knowledge on the existence of exoplanets has widened far beyond my imagination through the discussion on Search for Exoplanets with Professor Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT. My interest in space is not newfound. Right from a very young age, I had always been keen to gaining knowledge about space and other planetary bodies. This research topic kindled my experience on learning about space. This led me to choose this podcast.

Sara’s research was based on the search for planets that orbit a star on a different solar system, in an intent to finding Earth-like planets. The universe is vast and contains millions of galaxies. We live in the Milky Way

This research focuses on primarily on exoplanets in various solar systems and finding a way to characterise each exoplanet. Exoplanets are the planets that orbit around a star other than our Sun. The idea of existence of exoplanets isn’t new as it was first proposed in the 16th century by Giordano Bruno, an Italian cosmologist. He proposed that there are many suns and planets that orbit around them in the universe. However, due to the technology of that time, he was unable prove it. Thereafter, the first to confirm the existence was Aleksander Wolszczan, a Polish astronomer in the year 1922. Planets were found to orbit around a highly magnetized white-dwarf star named Pulsar. Several detections of exoplanets were discovered later till date. But only recently, the existence was discovered more practically by a group of scientists among which, Sara is one. The team recorded the first light emitted from an exoplanet and the first spectrum of an exoplanet. This became one of the few major discoveries in recent years in the field of astronomy. Planets are usually small compared to the star. So, it’s hard to notice the light emitted from a planet when it orbits a star as the light of the star is much larger in size and brighter. Scientists solved this problem by developing two techniques for detecting exoplanets. They are namely, Transit method and Radio Velocity method. Transmit method involves