With the discovery so far of more than 3,300 planets orbiting other stars, the challenge now is to learn more about these distant worlds. The mere act of discovering an exoplanet gives some information about its nature.
With the two main planet detection techniques – the radial velocity and transit methods – we see a star wobbling or winking, periodically.
The period of the wobble, or the time between winks, tells us the orbital period. From the orbital period, we calculate the size of the planet’s orbit. The closer a planet is to its star, the shorter its orbital period.
For planets discovered using the radial velocity technique we can learn a little more about the planet’s orbit by studying the way that the host star wobbles. The more circular the planet’s orbit, the more regular will be the wobble.
But our observations have revealed that some planets move on orbits that are far from circular. And, as we’ve discussed before, such planets are an important piece of our best explanation of the origin of some of the strangest planets found to date.
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