Methods of Detecting Extrasolar Planets Including Radial Velocity, Pulsar Timing, Transit Method, Gravitational Microlensing, and Direct Imaging

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Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, only very few extrasolar planets have been observed directly. Instead, astronomers have generally had to resort to indirect methods to detect extrasolar planets. At the present time, several different indirect methods have yielded success. This book studies detection methods for extrasolar planets including Doppler spectroscopy, photometry, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, and the Gemini Observatory.

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