• Question: Is the evidence of any other planets out side of our own solar system?

    Asked by kieranbrimicombe to Donna, Jo, Mark, Stuart, timcraggs on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      Yes – there are lots of other planets. Our sun is a pretty average star, so most stars like this have planets orbiting them. It’s believed that about 10% of stars will have associated planets – so there are probably about a thousand billion billion planets but we’ve only seen a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of them. Recently there has been a flurry of activity (a lot based at UCL) in finding planets outside of the solar system – so called “exoplanets”, with new more sensitive methods of detection being developed all the time. Last year almost a 100 were found and I think the total is now close to 500 – the first was found about 20 years ago but the majority have been found in the last 5 years. One of these planets was found by an undergraduate doing a final-year project in their Astrophysics degree at UCL…..

    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      Oh yes, kieranbrimicombe. They’re called extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. Our solar system is nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Space is massive. I mean really huge. There’s a bit of a debate quite how big it is as no has ever travelled to edge of it so we’ve got to estimate. The distance to the edge of the known universe is said to be 100,000 million million million kilometers away so there’s plenty of space for other planets. So far, there have not been many earth-like planets discovered but more like gas giants like Jupiter.

      Ah ha, so it’s evidence you want, is it? Well scientists have seen them and there’s no better evidence than that.

      .

    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Apparently there are planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets. Over 400 have been identified so far.

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      A friend of mine in the department of Astronomy here in St Andrews, spends his time looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems. I think he found one very recently!

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