Light and shadow from distant worlds

Drake Deming () and Sara Seager
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Drake Deming: Planetary Systems Laboratory, Code 693, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA
Sara Seager: Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Nature, 2009, vol. 462, issue 7271, 301-306

Abstract: The road to rocky planets Drake Deming and Sara Seager review the properties of the 370-plus planets so far found orbiting stars other than the Sun. Early extrasolar planet discoveries depended on the radial velocity or Doppler wobble technique, measuring the effect of the planet's gravity on the star's spectrum. Increasingly, new discoveries rely on the transit method, observing the planet as it transits its star as seen from Earth. This method makes it possible to measure the planet's mass and radius — and in some cases to identify gases in the atmospheres of giant exoplanets. With new satellite observatories on the way, Deming and Seager anticipate that, some time in the next decade, a 'habitable' rocky planet will be discovered transiting a cool red dwarf star close to our Sun. This review features in our International Year of Astronomy package on http://go.nature.com/Z35PCw .

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08556

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