These web pages are designed to give an overview on The various Methods of Detecting extrasolar planets...
The general definition of an extrasolar planet is simply a planet that is orbiting a star other than our own. Up until a recently, i.e. within the last five or six years, no one could prove that there was such a thing as an extrasolar planet. The very existence of our solar system along with models of the solar system formation, indicate that there may be other systems around other stars. Major advancements in technology have allowed the application of various methods to locate some of the elusive extrasolar planets.
The first method and the most obvious, is direct imaging. This involves observing the planets by their reflected light, much as we observe Mars or any other solar system object, but this has it's difficulties as the planet's star is much brighter and obscures any Radiation including light that may be reflected. At present there are no telescopes that are capable of resolving the light of an orbiting planet from that of its parent star.