Rutgers University Astrophysics Seminar
Turn down the noise, turn up the planets
Why haven't we found any planetary systems that look like ours? We are now in the fourth decade of detecting planets around other stars, with more than 6000 planets in 4500 systems. Detections via transit have found plenty of small planets, packed tightly around their host star. Long running radial velocity surveys have found long period giant planets. The most common type of planet we have discovered is between the mass of Earth and Neptune, a size that doesn't exist in the Solar System. What we have not found, is a system of widely spaced planets, with rocky inner worlds and outer gas giants. I will discuss recent progress being made with extreme precision radial velocity (~ 30 cm/s precision) instruments. Both stellar and instrumental noise are the biggest obstacles to detecting faint signals. With the EXtreme PREcision Spectrometer (EXPRES), we now have seven years of high-cadence observations. We have leveraged that to identify and correct for instrumental noise sources and now have a wealth of new Keplerian signals.