Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found hundreds of planets outside of the Solar System. Marcy started his search in the 1980s when extrasolar planets, as such worlds are known, were considered by many to be closer to sci-fi than science.
Most exoplanets cannot be seen directly through telescopes because bright light from the stars that they orbit drowns them out. Instead, astronomers like Marcy use a variety of indirect techniques to find them. One method is to look for tiny wobbles in stars' positions caused by their gravitational interactions with orbiting planets.
Image: Geoffrey Marcy (credit: Dr Seth Shostak/SPL)
The Sky at Night's Dr Chris Lintott joins Dr Geoffrey Marcy on his search for extrasolar planets. Marcy explains how he uses the Keck telescope in Hawaii to search for planets around other stars.
Planet hunter Geoffrey Marcy explains how he finds planets around other stars.
Dr Lynn Rothschild explains how the Earth is located in the habitable zone of the Sun, an orbit that permits liquid water to exist. Astronomers hope to find planets similar to the Earth in the habitable zones of other stars as part of their search for places where life could exist.
Geoffrey W. Marcy (born September 29, 1954, St. Clair Shores, Michigan) is an American astronomer, who is currently Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered, along with R. Paul Butler and Debra Fischer.
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