Weighing the Smallest Exoplanets: Support for An Interdisciplinary Workshop

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In the study of planets around other stars, telescopic observations called radial velocity measurements are needed for two reasons: First, these observations are one of the best methods for finding planets that are located very close to their stars. Second, for planets that move in front of their stars in their orbits, these observations tell astronomers the weight of the planets. The Third Workshop on Extremely Precise Radial Velocities will bring together 150 - 200 astronomers, engineers, and mathematicians to discuss ways to improve instruments and computing methods so that they can find and study the smallest Earth-like planets around other stars. This conference will serve the national interest by promoting the progress of science when successes, challenges, and plans to improve the precision of the telescopic observations needed to find these Earth-like planets are discussed and shared. The conference will last four days, and have talks and posters mixed with group discussions.The Principal Investigator requests support for a conference entitled "The Third Workshop on Extremely Precise Radial Velocities (EPRV III)." This international workshop will emphasize the discipline of extremely precise (1 m/s) Doppler velocimetry of stars, focusing on specific challenges toward achieving the 10 cm/s radial velocity precision needed to detect and characterize Earth analogs around G and K dwarf stars. The conference will assemble 150 to 200 instrument team participants, including observational and theoretical astronomers, statisticians, engineers, practitioners in high performance computing, heliophysicists, and others bridging these categories. The participants will address the significant hardware challenges specific to building EPRV instruments, the successes and lessons learned from the latest generation of EPRV instrumentation, new statistical and computational methods for signal extraction, analysis and jitter mitigation, and physical models and spectral diagnostics of stellar granulation and other sources of jitter. One planned outcome is a white paper directed at the role of EPRV instruments for the upcoming astronomy and astrophysics Decadal Survey. The conference is planned to last four days and will consist of invited plenary talks with time allocated for discussion between talks, breakout sessions on more specialized topics, and posters that will be displayed for the entire meeting.