RANDY L. PHELPS
This is the Other Worlds
Module
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Procedure
1. For this module, please look through the
"lecture" notes for "Other Worlds". These notes contain the material, in
condensed form, that I will expect you to become familiar with. I am sure you will
have questions about the material, especially since it is presented in the form of lecture
notes. To help you fill in the blanks, I have added web links within the lecture
notes to gain further insight into select portions of the material.
Goals
After you have
completed this assignment, you should be able to critically interpret the following
statements:
Planets likely form in the circumstellar disks of newly
forming stars
Extrasolar planets can be detected from the "Doppler
Wobble", brightness variations of stars resulting from planetary transits, and
potentially by observing spatial wobbles of stars. Direct imaging of extrasolar
planets has been reported, but this has not yet been confirmed. NASA plans
spacecraft to directly image extrasolar planets.
Currently detected extrasolar planets are large, a result
of observational biases. These detections reveal that our understanding of solar
system formation is incomplete.
Future studies are aimed to detect Earth-like planets
around other stars.
After you have
completed this assignment, you should be able to answer these, and similar questions:
Where do planets likely form around newly forming
stars?
- What is the so-called "Doppler Wobble"?
- How does the radial velocity of a star change as a planet
orbits a star?
- How does the mass of a planet affect the observed Doppler
wobble of a star?
- How does the distance of a planet from its parent star
affect the observed Doppler wobble of a star?
- How might a planetary transit allow for its detection as an
extrasolar planet?
- Have extrasolar planets been directly imaged?
- How do the masses of detected extrasolar planets compare to
those in our Solar System?
- How do the orbital radii of detected massive
extrasolar planets compare to those in our Solar System?
- How do the orbital eccentricities of detected extrasolar
planets compare to those in our Solar System?
- How do recently detected extrasolar planets affect our
understanding of our own Solar System's formation?
- What is the Terrestrial Planet Finder and why is it of
interest?
- How might future spectroscopy of extrasolar planets reveal
possible life on other planets?
The
above questions, and variants of them, will form the exam questions for this portion of
the course. It is, therefore, to your advantage to do this web-based assignment!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________