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by welterde
3405 days ago
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So first of these are not images of stars, but spectra.
From these spectra you can extract quite a number of observables, such as radial velocity (how fast it is coming towards/moving away from us) in this case. Since planets orbiting stars are not massless, both the star and the planets orbit a common center of mass, causing the star to periodically move toward/away from us (much more complicated of course with multiple planets, plane of the planets, oscillations in the star itself, etc.) - which we can measure. To find exoplanets using this methods you need spectographs, which are very stable in the long-term (especially if you are interested in lower mass planets) and can measure radial velocities in the range of 1 m/s, such as HARPS [1]. [1] http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/... |
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