Related papers: Design Considerations for a Ground-based Transit S…

Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs are good candidates for the study of habitability and detection of biosignatures. To search for these planets, we analyze all available radial velocity data and apply four signal…

Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…

We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…

We present radial velocity (RV) measurements of our sample of 40 M dwarfs from our planet search programme with VLT+UVES begun in 2000. Although with our RV precision down to 2 - 2.5 m/s and timebase line of up to 7 years, we are capable of…

Over the past few years, astronomers have detected thousands of planets and candidate planets by observing their periodic transits in front of their host stars. Related methods might soon allow studies of the chemical imprints of life in…

The MEarth Project is a photometric survey systematically searching the smallest stars nearest to the Sun for transiting rocky planets. Since 2008, MEarth has taken approximately two million images of 1844 stars suspected to be mid-to-late…

Zechmeister et al. (2009) surveyed 38 nearby M dwarfs from March 2000 to March 2007 with VLT2 and the UVES spectrometer. This data has recently been reanalyzed (Butler et al. 2019), yielding a significant improvement in the Doppler velocity…

In light of the growing interest in searching for low mass, rocky planets, we investigate the impact of starspots on radial velocity searches for earth-mass planets in orbit about M dwarf stars. Since new surveys targeting M dwarfs will…

We report the first ground-based transit observation of K2-3d, a 1.5 R_Earth planet supposedly within the habitable zone around a bright M-dwarf host star, using the Okayama 188 cm telescope and the multi(grz)-band imager MuSCAT. Although…

Radial velocity searches for extrasolar planets have recently detected several very low mass (7-20M_Earth) planets in close orbits with periods <10 days. We consider the prospects for detecting the analogs of these planets in Galactic open…

Stellar activity and rotation frustrate the detection of exoplanets through the radial velocity technique. This effect is particularly of concern for M dwarfs, which can remain magnetically active for billions of years. We compile rotation…

The search for small planets orbiting late M dwarfs holds the promise of detecting Earth-size planets for which their atmospheres could be characterised within the next decade. The recent discovery of TRAPPIST-1 entertains hope that these…

Doppler and transit surveys are finding extrasolar planets of ever smaller mass and radius, and are now sampling the domain of superEarths (1-3 Earth radii). Recent results from the Doppler surveys suggest that discovery of a transiting…

Studies of transiting Neptune-size planets orbiting close to nearby bright stars can inform theories of planet formation because mass and radius and therefore mean density can be accurately estimated and compared with interior models. The…

We present the first results from our Red Optical Planet Survey (ROPS) to search for low mass planets orbiting late type dwarfs (M5.5V - M9V) in their habitable zones (HZ). Our observations, with the red arm of the MIKE spectrograph (0.5 -…

Planet formation theories predict a large but still undetected population of short-period terrestrial planets orbiting brown dwarfs. Should specimens of this population be discovered transiting relatively bright and nearby brown dwarfs, the…

The precision of radial velocity (RV) measurements to detect indirectly planetary companions of nearby stars has improved to enable the discovery of extrasolar planets in the Neptune and Super-Earth mass range. Discoveries of Earth-like…

M dwarfs constitute more than 70% of the stars in the solar neighborhood. They are cooler and smaller than Sun-like stars and have less-massive disks which suggests that planets around these stars are more likely to be Neptune-size or…

In our search for life beyond the Solar System, certain planetary bodies may be more conducive to life than Earth. However, the observability of these `superhabitable' planets in the habitable zones around K dwarf stars has not been fully…

Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…