Collaborative Research: Hunting for Small Planets

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Discoveries of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system have captivated the public imagination and ignited a search for our nearest planetary neighbors. This team will use the Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope at Lick Observatory to hunt for these 'extrasolar' planets in a three-year survey of Sun-like stars. The APF-50 Survey will discover rocky planets orbiting nearby stars and make a census of their masses and orbital shapes and sizes. The resulting catalog of nearby planets will provide insights into the formation and structure of rocky planets and will provide targets for detailed follow-up measurements by other teams. Through this program the PI and his graduate students will also mentor talented high school students in Hawaii on science fair projects through the HI STAR program.The APF-50 Survey is a deep search for planets orbiting fifty nearby, bright G and K dwarf stars using the 2.4-meter APF Telescope. This Doppler planet search exploits the high observational cadence afforded by nearly nightly access to APF. The large number of precise measurements from the Levy Spectrometer make APF sensitive to Doppler signals three times smaller than in the previous Eta-Earth Survey at Keck Observatory. Newly-discovered planets will be mostly super-Earths and sub-Neptunes with orbital periods of 200 days or shorter, and possibly Earth-mass planets with orbital periods of a few days. Using injection-recovery tests of the APF planet sensitivity, the team will map out the occurrence of small planets as a function of their masses and semi-major axes.