Topic: Extrasolar Planets in the Classroom

[sam]

Bit of mindless self promotion here.. but I thought, Clive at the least, might be interested in this... I have had an article accepted for publication in the IoPs Physics Education journal:

The field of extrasolar planets is still, in comparison with other astrophysical topics, in its infancy. There have been about 300 or so extrasolar planets detected and their detection has been accomplished by various different techniques. Here we present a simple laboratory experiment to show how planets are detected using the transit technique. Following the simple analysis procedure describe we are able to determine the planetary radius to be 1.27 +/- 0.20 R_{J} which, within errors agrees with the establish value of 1.32 +/- 0.25 R_{J}.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.5690

[sam]

oh and if that scares you, one should look at the paper (I want to say seminal) on polarized source counts we just had accepted:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4228 

[Clive]

Well done Sam!  Can I access them via Simbad? 

[sam]

well eventually but simbad will just take you to those links anyway.

[Clive]

I missed the .pdf links this morning but I have now downloaded and printed them out for future reading.  Thanks very much for those.  Makes a change from radial velocity papers.   

[Rik]

That only happens to sheets which are A1 or larger, Clive. 

[Clive]

Show off!   

[sam]

glad tis something different to the radial velocities!!