So, we've finally found planets. But these planets are not quite what I would have expected to see.
Indeed, I struggle to get my head around how these things formed at all.
They're really weird planets. We only know that they're there because of the exquisite precision taken to measure the distance to pulsars,
so it's not a technique we could use anywhere else, and we don't know much about these planets.
We know a mass in orbit, but we don't know what they're actually like,
but odds are that they're these bleak, irradiated, horribly toxic planets.
Possibly made of diamonds in one case. These are nothing like anything we see in our own solar system.
They seem to be very rare as well, it's very interesting, but it sort of leaves me with an empty feeling.
I was sort of expecting to go out and look for planets more like Earth, or like we see around our own solar system.
Yes, I guess what we really want is planets that potentially might have life
or that we could go and colonise someday or we can set science fiction movies in them.
This is nothing like any of those.
So, that's what we're going to be talking about for the rest of this course,
is how we actually try and see if normal stars, stars like our own sun have planets.
It's a much more difficult activity and that's what we're going to be covering in the rest of this course.