Topic summary
Transit method
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Methods of detecting exoplanets.
Advantages of the transit method
The main advantage of the transit method is that the size of the planet can be determined from the light curve. When combined with the radial-velocity method (which determines the planet's mass), one can determine the density of the planet, and hence learn something about the planet's physical structure. The planets that have been studied by both methods are by far the best-characterized of all known exoplanets.