Making Sense of Extrasolar Planets

Over the past eight years, well over a hundred Jupiter-sized planets have been found around other nearby stars similar to our Sun, clearly demonstrating that the formation of planets is not a rare phenomenon. However, the characteristics of most of the extrasolar planets found so far are quite unlike those of the planets in our solar system. If these planets formed in the same manner as the planets in our solar system, then our current theory of solar system formation must be stretched significantly to begin to explain these results. The talk will present a discussion of the techniques used to detect planets around other stars, a summary of the interesting results obtained, and their implications for our theory of the formation of planets in general.