1. Solve for the Jupiter mass and separation of the three planetary systems that you choose under the catalog called Four Sample Stars. Note that you are to solve for three different systems using three different combinations of detector parameters (Case I, II and III) as specified on Week10 lecture "Doppler Wobble". The cases are located at the bottom of the page, below the tutorial. The link to the JAVA simulation is located under the same page under "Okay open up the Simulator"
these means doing 9 separate simulations and report on whether
or not a successful detection of a planetary "wobble" curve was achieved.
In most cases, there will not be a successful detection and you need to
think about and report on why that is the case.
The best way to do this is organize your data in a simple table in a word document, but it is not necessary.
a) record the mass of the hypothetical planet,
b) record the distance of the hypothetical planet and
c) the most important part argue whether or not the data is good enough to even perform a credible fit - in many cases the data is not good enough and you need to look at it and explain why.
2. In the class notes we make use of the Drake equation as providing a statistical estimate of the number of civilizations that might exist in our Galaxy and are capable of communication. Recently, however, some scientists have argued that the Drake equation is an inaccurate description. This new theory is known as the "Rare Earth Theory" (by Ward and Brownless). Do some research on this new theory and identify what the key components of this theory are that suggests planets like the Earth are much rarer than we think they are.