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Matteo Cantiello edited Intro.tex
about 10 years ago
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A revolution has occurred in the last two decades in the world of astrophysics.
It all started in the mid '90s with the first discovery of 'new worlds' around other stars. I remember hearing about the discovery of the first planet around a star other than the Sun on a bus ride to highschool. That was 51 Pegasi b, orbiting around a star about 50 light years away. I was blown away, my mind racing towards the amazing implications of that discovery. Little I knew that that was only the tip of the iceberg. The word 'Extrasolar planet' (or Exoplanet) is now widely used to identify planets\footnote{A planet is a celestial body massive enough to be bounded by its self gravity (unlike a rock or an asteroid, that are kept together by electromagnetic forces), but not massive enough to produce energy through nuclear fusion (as stars do)} orbiting a star other than the Sun.
Different methods for capturing the elusive signature of these distant worlds have been used, leading to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets
(4231 (\href{http://exoplanets.org/}{4231} between confirmed and candidate planets, as of 6 February 2014). The most remarkable discoveries came only in the last couple of years thanks to the
KEPLER \hre{http://kepler.nasa.gov/}{KEPLER} space telescope. This amazing instrument has been patiently looking for the tiny dimming induced by the passage of a planet in front of its host star, and helped to answer two fundamental questions:
\begin{enumerate}
\item How common are planets?
\item How common are planets similar to Earth?