Transcript

Carole Haswell:

Welcome to this free course on exoplanets. In this course, you’ll study one of the fastest moving and most exciting areas of astronomy. Obviously I’m a bit biased, because I chose to spend my life doing this. But I think this might be the most exciting area in the whole of science.

Before you can properly study exoplanets, planets that belong to other stars, you’ll need to cover some of the basics of astronomy. So we’ll take you on a whistle-stop tour of our own Solar System before looking at what we know about our universe on large scales.

There’s only time to give you the briefest overview in the three hours study this week, but I hope you like it. And I hope that it prompts you to explore astronomy outside this course, too. For example, if you ever need cheering up, visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive. I can always find something there that makes me smile or feel inspired. And I hope exoplanets will also inspire you. Let’s get started and see how it goes.