Explained: Transiting exoplanets
Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 11:52
in Astronomy & Space
In the quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, planetary scientists have detected more than 500 planets outside the solar system, or exoplanets, over the past 15 years. About one-fifth of those were discovered by scanning the sky for any change in a stars brightness that might be caused by a planet passing in front of that star as seen from Earth.