Extrasolar Planets
In 1995 the professional astronomers Marcy and Butler discovered a planet around the star Tau Bootis. In 2000 our team were the first amateurs to detect the wobble of the star caused by its planet and only 5 years behind the pros. See Spectrashift.com (no longer updated) to see details of my detection of a known exoplanet using a spectrograph and measuring its radial velocity. You can find our scientific publication on the detection Link.
Extrasolar planets are planets around stars other than our own Sun. They were only discovered in 1995 and are too far away to image even with the worlds largest telescopes. They can be detected however by watching the parent star wobble as the planet rotates around it. We can’t “see” this wobble in images but we can detect it by measuring the frequency shift in the light from the star as it moves back and forth, toward and away from us. If you have ever heard a train whistle go by you have experienced doppler shift. If you couldn’t see the train but had a recording of the whistle to analyze, you could tell the exact speed of the train. This is in essence what we do with starlight.
