Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

More than two decades after the discovery of the first exoplanet with radial velocity (RV) measurements, vast quantities of data exist from dedicated planet-hunting spectrographs. These spectra play an important role not only in the discovery and characterization of planets but also as a rich source of information about bright stars in the solar neighborhood. I will summarize efforts to gain insight into the planet formation process via extremely precise (0.01 dex) differential abundance measurements of nearby stars with and without planets using RV spectra. I will also discuss recent work on extending the power of next-generation RV spectrographs to detect Earth analogs around these stars.