Extrasolar planetas (exoplanets), or planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun, are a relatively new field of the astronomical and planetary sciences. After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, planet-finding activities appeared to have reached an end for the foreseeable future. Several brown dwarfs have been discovered between 1930 and 1993 orbiting other solar-type star. Brown dwarfs (or "failed stars") are low-mass celestial objects (M?10MJUP) that formed by stellar processes but did not obtain the critical mass required to sustain hydrogen burning within their core. Other claims for planetary detections were also made during the period 1944 - 1970 but were never verified or were later shown to be false, produced by timing artifacts or instrumentation errors. The first confirmed detection of an extrasolar planet occurred in 1992 when two bodies were found to be orbiting the millisecond pulsar PSR 1257+12 (Wolszczan and Frail, 1992). The first detection of an extrasolar planet orbiting a solar-type star occurred in 1994 with the claim of a Jupiter-type planet orbiting 51 Pegasi (Mayor and Queloz, 1995). As of January 2010, we currently know of 429 planets orbiting solar-type stars The vast majority of these detections have occurred via the radial velocity method (Udry & Santos 2007), although other methods such as that of transiting photometry and microlensing may become increasingly important in future planet searches as we seek to detect terrestrial-sized planetary bodies and utilize space- based observing programs.