Are You Kidding?

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In the 19 eighties, it wasn't really considered possible to be a good astronomer and do something like looking for planets. But i was never surprised. A on the basis of the one data point we have in the solar system, it makes perfect sense to me there should be planets. I'm with you. Im also human, and you're also human in selike possible for us to hold these views. On the one hand, and on the other hand, that's never been done and is just got done. Wow.

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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