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
They find planets by observing distant stars. When a planet passes between its star and the telescope the light which we see from that star changes. First of all, it becomes dimmer, and that’s how we determine that there’s a planet there. But also other properties of the light (like spectrum) change after it passes through the planets atmosphere, so we can figure out what that atmosphere is made of, and then infer the conditions on the planets surface. The light still looks like a single point no matter how big the telescope, there is no way to actually “see” an extrasolar planet.
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