Sharon Xuesong Wang (Carnegie DTM)

Finding Terrestrial Planets with Precise Radial Velocities // Precise radial velocities revealed the first exoplanets around Sun-like stars, and most of the first few hundreds. In the past few years, the Kepler mission has changed the landscape of exoplanet discovery and revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets as a population. What is next for precise radial velocities (PRV)? In the near future, PRV will play an important role in following up TESS candidates, selecting targets for direct imagine missions, revealing the full architecture of exoplanet systems, and searching for Earth analogs. In particular, we will overcome a suite of challenges in hardware, software, and astrophysics to improve the RV precision towards 10 cm/s. This talk will highlight a few challenges that we are facing in PRV, especially in software and stellar astrophysics, and present works and projects addressing these challenges in order to find and characterize small, terrestrial planets.