Searching for orbiting companion stars
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 09:45
in Astronomy & Space
The search for exoplanets via the radial velocity technique has been underway for nearly 30 years. The method searches for wobbles in a star's motion caused by the presence of orbiting bodies. It has been very successful, detecting hundreds of exoplanets, but has been overtaken (at least in numbers of detections) by the transit method, which looks for dips in the star's light.