Professor Adam Burrows presents “The New Century of Exoplanets”
THE STUDY OF EXOPLANETS has emerged in the last decade to be one of the most exciting new areas of astronomy and planetary science. since 1995, more than 430 planets outside the solar system have been discovered. Collectively, they span a huge range of masses and orbital distances, have been found around most types of stars, and have led to major revisions in our ideas of how and where planets form. the majority of these planets are gas giants like Jupiter, but more than 60 are of neptune mass. excitingly, some of the recently discovered planets are near the mass and radius of the earth. hence, the pioneering era of exoplanets has commenced in earnest and promises to be a central focus of an increasing fraction of the world’s astronomers for the foreseeable future. I will review the current state of this burgeoning field, what we have discovered to date, and what the future may hold as we accelerate the discovery of the myriad worlds now just over our horizon and coming fast into view.