Almost All Stars Have Planets Around Them

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Back in the eightiesiit just was not, it just didn't get funded. You couldn't get telescope time to do something like that. And askinghow fraction of those stars out there have planets around them was not really seen as a valid question. Even if you could go back in time and use the exact same appeals that we use, based on like na, the justification that we have now, it might not even go over so well. It makes you wonder what other things we're missing.

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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