Transcript

Carole Haswell:

Now, you’re going to study one of the most beautifully simple techniques in 21st century astrophysics, the transit method for detecting and measuring the size of exoplanets. I love this so much that some of the early results prompted me to completely redirect my own research to study exoplanets instead. I wrote a book called Transiting Exoplanets, which was published in 2010. And I’ve used telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope to study them.

This week, you’ll learn a lot more about transits and enough about stars to be able to appreciate how our knowledge of stars helps us to measure and work out the properties of their planets. Telescopes are obviously important tools for astronomy. What may be less obvious is the importance of calculus.

Calculus is a branch of maths, and it’s no coincidence that it was invented by the first person to work out the rules of gravity. This week, you’ll see a cartoon, which beautifully illustrates how calculus works. I hope you enjoy it.

Finally, we’ll bring it all together. You’ll see how we know the size of thousands of individual exoplanets even though we can’t see them.