The difficulty of using the Doppler shift to measure the wobble of a star
Monday, October 6, 2014 - 09:31
in Astronomy & Space
One of the biggest advances of astronomy in the past decade has been the discovery of planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets. But just how many exoplanets have been discovered? According to the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, a semi-official catalog based in Europe, there were as of the end of September last year 990 confirmed exoplanets and 2,321 candidate exoplanets. The discrepancy between these numbers has to do with the limitations of the observational data we currently have.