Poster Abstracts

Name/Affiliation:  Duncan Wright (University of New South Wales)

Title:  Searching for rocky worlds around cool stars

Abstract:
Finding Earth-like planets orbiting in the ‘habitable zone’ of other stars is one of the major goals of modern astronomy. Indications from both Doppler planet searches and Kepler are that rocky planets around low-mass stars are very common. With modern high-precision spectrographs it is possible to detect these planets using the Doppler velocity technique. A search for habitable-zone exoplanets orbiting mid-late type M Dwarfs dwarfs on the Anglo-Australian Telescope began in late 2012. This program operates in the red (500-1000 nm) to obtain high signal-to-noise precision velocities. This presentation outlines the new instrumentation and reduction techniques developed specifically for this project and the current results from this survey.