Extrasolar Planets: Homework 1

This homework must be submitted on paper or via E-mail (mwrsps@rit.edu) before 17:00 on Monday, Oct 14.

You can also find these questions, and materials to help you answer them, in Lecture 1.

1. The star 51 Peg was in observed in radial velocity by Marcy et al. (1997). Use the measurements from this paper which are available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive to answer the following questions.
   1. Approximately how big are the variations in velocity?
   2. Approximately what is the period of the variations?
2. The next questions refer to the exoplanet around a different star, called 51 Eri.
   1. Based on Macintosh et al. (2015), approximately what was the angular separation between host star and exoplanet in the discovery images?
   2. De Rosa et al. (2015) attempt to compute an orbit for this exoplanet around 51 Eri. The result is not very good because they had positions of the object at only ______ different times. (Fill in the blank)