The search for life beyond Earth continues, but it starts with being able to observe and catalog exoplanets. Here's a look at the main ways we discover these faraway worlds.
The James Webb Space Telescope was decades in the making. Since it finally took flight, began to deploy, stabilized in its orbit around Earth, and deployed its primary mirror – a process that was just completed on 1 August 2022, we’ve already discovered so many incredible things.
When a planet transits its star relative to Earth, some of the star’s light – a teensy, tiny fraction of a little bit – will filter through the planet’s atmosphere. How much light is obstructed gives us information about the exoplanet’s mass. Then, using a technique called the transit spectroscopy method, we can obtain theby breaking that light apart, much like a prism breaks white light into various colors of the rainbow, to study the composition of the planet’s atmosphere .
More specifically, we’re able to see these wobbles and glean information from their effects thanks to something known as the Doppler effect. This phenomenon is widely used across many subsets of astrophysics. It is a shift in the frequency of waves emitted from an object moving relative to the observer. With respect to the radial velocity method, from our vantage point, these very minute “tugs” noticeably change the usual color signature of the star.
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