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Doppler spectroscopy (also known as the radial-velocity method, or colloquially, the wobble method) is an indirect method for finding extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs from radial-velocity measurements via observation of Doppler shifts in the spectrum of the planet's parent star. As of November 2022, about 19.5% of known extrasolar planets (1,018 of the total) have been discovered using Doppler spectroscopy. Otto Struve proposed in 1952 the use of powerful spectrographs to detect distant planets. He described how a very large planet, as large as Jupiter, for example, would cause its parent star to wobble slightly as the two objects orbit around their center of mass. He predicted that the small Doppler shifts to the light emitted by the star, caused by its continuously varying radial velocity, would be detectable by the most sensitive spectrographs as tiny redshifts and blueshifts in the star's emission. However, the technology of the time produced radial-velocity measurements with errors of 1,000 m/s or more, making them useless for the detection of orbiting planets. The expected changes in radial velocity are very small – Jupiter causes the Sun to change velocity by about 12.4 m/s over a period of 12 years, and the Earth's effect is only 0.1 m/s over a period of 1 year – so long-term observations by instruments with a very high resolution are required. Advances in spectrometer technology and observational techniques in the 1980s and 1990s produced instruments capable of detecting the first of many new extrasolar planets. The ELODIE spectrograph, installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory in Southern France in 1993, could measure radial-velocity shifts as low as 7 m/s, low enough for an extraterrestrial observer to detect Jupiter's influence on the Sun. Using this instrument, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz identified 51 Pegasi b, a "Hot Jupiter" in the constellation Pegasus. Although planets had previously been detected orbiting pulsars, 51 Pegasi b was the first planet ever confirmed to be orbiting a main-sequence star, and the first detected using Doppler spectroscopy.

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Methods of detecting exoplanets

Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.

Minimum mass

In astronomy, minimum mass is the lower-bound calculated mass of observed objects such as planets, stars and binary systems, nebulae, and black holes. Minimum mass is a widely cited statistic for extrasolar planets detected by the radial velocity method or Doppler spectroscopy, and is determined using the binary mass function. This method reveals planets by measuring changes in the movement of stars in the line-of-sight, so the real orbital inclinations and true masses of the planets are generally unknown.

Radial velocity

The radial velocity or line-of-sight velocity, also known as radial speed or range rate, of a target with respect to an observer is the rate of change of the distance or range between the two points. It is equivalent to the vector projection of the target-observer relative velocity onto the relative direction connecting the two points. In astronomy, the point is usually taken to be the observer on Earth, so the radial velocity then denotes the speed with which the object moves away from the Earth (or approaches it, for a negative radial velocity).

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