Most exoplanets are found through indirect methods: measuring the dimming of a star that happens to have a planet pass in front of it, called the transit method, or monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet pulling on its star and causing its light to subtly Doppler shift. Space telescopes have found thousands of planets by observing “transits,” the slight dimming of light from a star when its tiny planet passes between it and our telescopes. Other detection methods include gravitational lensing, the so-called “wobble method.”---------------------------------------Distant Nature: Astronomy Exercises 2016 by Stephen Tuttle under license "Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike".

Today Phil explains that YES, there are other planets out there and astronomers have a lot of methods for detecting them. Nearly 2000 have been found so far. The most successful method is using transits, where a planet physically passes in front of its parent star, producing a measurable dip in the star’s light. Another is measuring the Doppler shift in a star’s light due to reflexive motion as the planet orbits. Exoplanets appear to orbit nearly every kind of star, and we’ve even found planets that are the same size as Earth. We think there may be many billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Chapters:
Introduction: Exoplanets
Reflexive Motion
Discovering the First Exoplanets
51 Pegasi b
Exoplanets in Transit
Detecting Exoplanet Transits
Photographing Exoplanets
Kinds of Exoplanets
Earth-like Exoplanets
Review

students are engaged in reflecting on whether plate tectonics is a general theory of planetary organization and evolution. Students use topographic, magnetic, spectral, and other data from NASA and ESA missions to determine whether "Earth-style" plate tectonics is functional on planets and moons elsewhere in the solar system. Students are engaged in a data-rich environment from which they must formulate and test multiple hypotheses. Throughout the process, students are engaged in small groups to identify what they need to learn to answer their questions, what resources are available to them, how best to report their findings, and how they can assess the amount of learning that is taking place.

This sample syllabus for a course on planets, exoplanets, and SETI (using the OpenStax Astronomy textbook) may help beginning instructors think through what sorts of things they might want to put on a syllabus. It can also provide guidance on how to select key sections of the textbook for a course that doesn’t have time to cover everything.

This text includes 25 reading assignments for an introductory astronomy course. They have been modified from the OpenStax Astronomy 2e and College Physics 2e (linked in related resources below) textbooks to order the topics in a logical manner for a one semester course and provide shortened (~10-20 pages) readings intended for biweekly reading assignments. The text also features enhanced treatment of the Newton's Laws, Energy, and Optics content that go beyond the typical introductory astronomy course for non-majors.

Course connections: This content was built for an introductory survey of astronomy course (e.g., PHYS 103), including apparent motions of objects in the sky, light, telescopes, solar system objects, exoplanets, the sun, stars, galaxies, and cosmology. Basic math skills (arithmetic, powers, scientific notation, unit conversions) will be used frequently. This course is designed for students in all majors.

In this episode, Katie Mack and John Green discuss why life was able to happen.

Chapters
Introduction
The Elements We're Made Of
Our Solar System Forms
Life on Earth
Life on Other Planets
The Human Pursuit of Understanding

A researcher from NASA Ames shares his work to develop new direct imaging technologies to study exoplanets in greater detail and discover habitable worlds outside of our solar system.

This activity includes twelve monthly star charts to identify the stars that are visible in the night sky and that are known to have planets around them. The star maps can be used to find constellations and identify stars with extrasolar planets. (Northern Hemisphere only, naked eye)