University of Pennsylvania Astrophysics Seminar

The discovery of a true Earth twin exoplanet (an Earth-mass planet orbiting a Sun-like star within the habitable zone) has been a long-standing goal in the field, and advances in observational technology over the past decades have been moving us ever closer to achieving it. Modern extreme precision radial velocity (EPRV) spectrographs are carefully engineered to achieve measurement precisions at the cm/s level necessary for Earth twin detection. Even with this technology, many challenges stand in the way of finding Earths, ranging from the practicalities of survey design and execution to the "noisy" astrophysical processes that dominate the signals from stars we observe. In this talk, I'll give an overview of modern prospects for finding Earths through the radial velocity technique, highlighting the primary challenges and the places where progress is being made. I'll dive into some specific areas where interesting work is happening, including fundamental changes in the ways we calibrate instruments and new paradigms for modeling stellar physics in the full spectrum. I'll conclude with a look at what's to come for the field with next-generation dedicated Earth-finding surveys like the Terra Hunting Experiment.