Side-by-side animations of a star and planet orbiting their common center of gravity (barycenter), and of the pair moving through space as they orbit, creating the star's "wobble" that revealed the planet.
This technique, called the astrometric technique, is expected to be particularly good for detecting Jupiter-like planets in orbits distant from the star. This is because when a massive planet orbits a star, the wobble produced in the star increases with a larger separation between the planet and the star, and at a given distance from the star, the more massive the planet, the larger the wobble produced.
Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
