Transcript

Carole Haswell:

This week, you’ll be looking in more detail at the planets in our own Solar System. They’re the only planets in the Universe we can get such detailed information on, so it’s important to know a bit about them before you move on to planets orbiting other stars.

We can’t see exoplanets directly, except possibly in a few very special cases. And we have to be quite clever to work out their properties. Until we started to discover exoplanets, I was much more interested in other parts of astronomy. But exoplanets offer so much scope for the imagination.

I love the cleverness of the techniques that we’ve developed to learn about exoplanets. There’s something almost like fate in the fact that modes of thought, which humans have evolved to survive on Earth, allow us to work out so much about remote objects we can’t see.

It’s almost as though the Universe is there specifically for us to exercise our ingenuity and to see how far it takes us. Now, to get very far in astronomy, or any other science, you need to know some maths. And this week is probably the most maths intensive.

But by the end of it, you should be able to deal with literally astronomical sized numbers. You can still pass the course without mastering the maths, but your appreciation of astronomy will be much deeper if you can become fluent in the maths we use. You might even get to enjoy it. I do. Right then. Let’s get on with it.