Apr 222015
 

Astronomers detect starlight reflected off an extrasolar planet

Well, *seen* is you stretch the definition a bit. It seems what’s actually going on is that the light from the star is carefully examined spectrographically; some tiny fraction of the light is red or blue shifted compared to the rest. This is the sunlight reflected off the planet and shifted due to the orbital motion of the planet towards or away from Earth relative to the star.

 Posted by at 3:08 pm