Ep. 502: No Touching: Determining Composition of Worlds Remotely

How do you know what something is made of if you can’t reach out and touch it? How do we know what planets lights years away have in their atmosphere? What about the rocks all around Curiosity? Or the geysers coming out of Europa and Enceladus? Scientists have a few handy tricks.

Ep. 366: HARPS Spectrograph

Almost all the planet hunting has been done from space. But there’s a new instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher which has already turned up 130 planets. Is this the future? Searching for planets from the ground?

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