Discovering Exoplanets ~ Dr. Sebastian von Harrach

The first exoplanet, a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system, was discovered in 1992 and over 6000 exoplanets have since been listed as confirmed in the NASA exoplanet archive. This talk describes the terrestrial and space telescopes used to discover exoplanets and explains the techniques used by astronomers to measure their properties. However, measurements on eclipsing binary systems published by various astronomers including the Altair research group, of which David Pulley and I are members, have shown that the existence of exoplanets in these systems is rather controversial.