The Micro Lensing Technique

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Dopler, transit and direct imaging techniques are all able to find planets without many orders of magnetude difference between how many we find. It almost seems like a fine tuning problem, that these very different methods are giving us ball park similar kind of results. I mean, it's really encouraging. Like this is like f those science moments, very like, oh, this is how we learne toThis is how we start to believe. Soow, it's not just that we got an answer e, but we got the answer three times with three completely different techniques. And so i think that, you know, with the lengthening base lines and the increasing technology that allow us to

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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