The MEarth Project: An All-sky Transit Search for Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones of Low-mass Stars

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This project will provide funds to continue operations of the MEarth facility, which consists of eight 40cm optical telescopes in Arizona, and to expand the project with another array of eight identical telescopes in Chile in order to provide both northern and southern hemisphere sky coverage. The telescopes will be used to complete a 3-year all-sky survey to search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable-zones of the 3500 nearest late M-dwarf stars. M-dwarf stars are selected instead of solar-type stars, because their cooler temperatures, smaller radii, and lower masses will all lead to easier detections of transiting planets with less observing time required. Graduate and undergraduate students, and a postdoctoral research will be funded to participate in the research. In addition to searching for habitable planets, the project will produce useful data on low-mass eclipsing binary stars, transiting brown dwarfs and the characterization of the spin-down rate of fully convective stars.