Extreme Universe - Planet Hunters Episode

Approximately two weeks ago I recorded an episode of Extreme Universe featuring planet hunters and their discoveries. I managed to watch about twenty-five minutes of the hour episode before I reached my boiling point and had to stop and delete this episode from my DVR.

First, lets start with the concept of how planets are discovered. It's plain and simple, because planets would be too hard to spot directly using the billion dollar telescopes that are located around the world, astronomers choose a section of stars and watch for a star to have signs of wobbling. Here's my problem with this:
1. American astronomers decided that to make a star wobble, a planet approximately the size of Jupiter would have to be traveling around that star.
2. Using Jupiter for their example, the Americans believed that no wobbles would be seen for about twelve years. This concept was agreed upon because it takes Jupiter twelve years to rotate around our own star.

The wobble theory turned out to be useful in late 1995 when a Swedish astronomer decided to look at a different portion of sky and realized after four days that one of the stars in his section of sky had a wobble. This brought about several other discoveries and theories:
1. The Americans went back through their records that started in 1986 and found that they had actually missed several wobbling stars because they weren't looking for wobbles yet because their concept was based on Jupiter's travel time.
2. Jupiter sized planets that traveled so fast around a star, anywhere from four days to several years, would simply be an inferno, those rendering the planet uninhabitable.

This inferno theory is what finally broke the camels back for me. After concluding that even those metals that we believe we couldn't melt, it was hypothesised they would be melted within a matter of seconds on entry into one of these planets. Though the next thing that was discussed was our sending of probes to gather data. Problems with this is probes would be constructed of metal, which we were just informed would inevitably burn up on entry. Not only this but to slow these probes down we were to jettison parachutes, can you say DUH!!!

At this point I turned the episode off. Fumed a bit about how stupid astronomers are, and on how many other things we could be wasting our time looking for using these expensive telescopes. Like alien aircraft.