EXOEarths program

The EXOEarths program aims at doing frontier research to explore:

in unique detail the stellar limitations of the radial-velocity technique, as well as ways of reducing them, having in mind the detection of Earth-like planets
to develop and apply software packages aiming at the study of the properties of the planet host stars, having in mind the full characterization of the newfound planets, as well as understanding planet formation processes.

These goals will improve our capacity to detect, study, and characterize new very low mass extra-solar planets. The results of this project will have a strong impact on the exploitation of future instruments, like the ESPRESSO spectrograph for the VLT. They will also be of extreme importance to current state-of-the-art planet-search projects aiming at the discovery of other Earths, in particular those making use of the radial-velocity method.

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