The Solar System Looks Very Unusual

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The collection of solar systems is a little bit more heterogeneous and varied than than we woul expected before. We actually, ii think in one way that you look at the solar system, it is that it has the sun in the centre,. The sun is this a ball of hydrogen. That is its mass. But there's all these other kinds of stars. There's less massive stars called the red dwarfs. And so what we found is that red dwarfs have planets in abundance. They now just automatically move into what is typical in the galaxy. Most the most typical star is a red dwarf. So if you look at it through that lens, then then our sun looks very unusual

Recent years have seen a revolution in the study of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun (or don’t orbit stars at all). After a few tentative detections in the 1990s, dedicated instruments in the 2000s have now pushed the number of known exoplanets into the thousands, enough to begin to categorize their distribution and properties. Today’s guest is John Asher Johnson, one of the leaders in this field. We talk about the various different ways that exoplanets can be detected, what we know about them know, and what might happen in the future.

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John Asher Johnson received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently professor of astronomy at Harvard University. He is the founder and director of the Banneker Institute for summer undergraduate research. Among his awards are the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society. He is the author of How Do You Find an Exoplanet?

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