Mopping up on Exoplanets

It's a bit unfair to say I'm “mopping up” − there are two full weeks of the course, about direct imaging (at last!) and Earth-like planets − but it's clearly on the way out, and it's getting possible to start thinking back about the course.

This has been a surprisingly (or maybe not, I'm not at all a student of astronomy) technical, more than scientific, course. I mean, Paul Francis did whip out his tablet to perform some calculations, but they were fairly simple, by and large, much more than the (already not very advanced) physics of The Greatest Mysteries of the Universe. Here, instead of big questions about gamma ray bursts and Type 1a supernovae, what we have is a celebration of the ingenuity of the engineers making possible something as staggeringly complex as detecting planets orbiting distant stars.

The engineer in me is happy − and it's true these are fantastic achievements.

The course itself follows the same format as Greatest Mysteries: every week has a topic (“radial velocities”, “gravitational microlensing”), which Paul Francis and Brian Schmidt discuss in a Socratic manner, which is an impressive way of saying they convey all the knowledge through dialogue, bouncing questions off each other. Schmidt takes something of a backseat here, often playing the naive novice who asks questions of Francis; maybe he's less comfortable with the topic than with cosmology (or maybe it's a subliminal message: you may have a Nobel Prize, you're still − always − in a position to receive wisdom from your peers). Both lecturers' enthusiasm (especially Francis') is still communicative. Besides the video lectures, we have each week a link to the papers discussed, a text summary of the lesson, a worked example, a graded problem (generally very easy) and a new episode of the Mystery.

Last time around, the mystery had us figure out a weird bouncing parallel universe. This time, we're still in a strange cosmos, but the issues are more technical: a red star seems on course to collide with the world, and we have to find a likely destination for the world's population. But of course, there's a twist…

I have to admit I haven't been as interested in this course's mystery as the last. Maybe it's the lack of bubbles, or maybe I'm just not very entranced by the nitty-gritty detail of surveying the sky, taking radial-velocity measurements, etc. I'll be happy to have the solution for the Mystery through the final exam, but I'm not really motivated enough to go beyond and investigate on my own.

That's perfectly all right. I'm not destined to be an astrophysicist (if I were, I guess I'd be more involved in finding a new haven for the Moggians), I'm there to have fun learning about stuff; and as far as fun is concerned, this course delivers.