I can understand the mass stuff since you can see how they attract/orbit etc, but how can they say stuff like “This planet has a thin atmosphere of 80% sulphur monoxide and 18% helium and it rains nano-diamonds periodically”.
How can you get all this stuff from looking through a telescope?
In: Physics
So we have a fairly good understanding of how stars work; we can discern quite a bit about them from their size and color and luminosity.
So now pass a planet in front of that light, and the light will change. Not only will it dim, because it’s partially obscured, but the spectral lines will change. From how they change, we can deduce the chemistry of the object that passed in front of it. We can, for example, tell that the object is gaseous, or has an atmosphere, or is rocky, and some of its basic chemical makeup. We can deduce more from other clues, like the period of the orbit, so it’s orbital distance, its gravity, other things.
A lot of the conclusions, like it rains diamonds, come from deduction. We understand pretty well how chemistry and physics work, so on some given planet, we know IT MUST rain nano diamonds, our understanding of physics tells us so, it’s predictive, and it tends to be pretty accurate.
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