Kepler - It's Not in Earth Orbit?

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The Kepler space telescope broke down after a decade in orbit. It had four reaction wheels that kept it pointed at the same place. The engineers figured out they could d the solar panels on the back of the earth are like the roof on a house. They come up to a point. So what they did, as they oriented kepler, the telescope into the stream of photons coming from the sun, and the exchange of momentum from all those photons breaking over the solar panels,. stabilized it oer dimension.

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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