ASTRON C10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Minimum Mass
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Document Summary
Large planets are always easier to detect smaller planet because: Take special photos of stars and look for little dots near the stars. This is hard because stars are a lot brighter than planets, so it"s hard to see the planets. See left picture below - if a planet is orbiting a star, both the star and planet are revolving around a center point. Since the star is so massive in comparison to the planet, the revolutions of the star are very small (which is why it"s referred to as a wobble ). This wobble is not that noticeable when viewing the star through a telescope. See right picture below - instead, to detect the doppler wobble, telescopes detect the star"s light and see if it"s blue-shifted or red-shifted. If the star is moving away from us, the wavelength of the light it emits will be longer, which is called red-shifted .
