Matteo Cantiello edited Intro.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 6561d99139acce14f1c39c83844bc8111ad7c1d7

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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 became  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. I remember hearing about the discovery of the first planet around a star other than the Sun (51 Pegasi, about 50 light years away) on a bus ride to school. I was blown away, my mind racing towards the amazing implications of that discovery. Little I knew that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Different methods for capturing the elusive signature of these distant worlds have been used, leading to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets (\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 \href{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?