Cool Stars and the Search for Planets
Low-mass stars (known as M dwarfs) are by far the most common stars in the Galaxy, but only a handful are known to host planets. I am working with a group at Penn State that is developing the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a near-infrared spectrograph that will search for the Doppler “wobbles” caused by planets orbiting nearby M dwarfs, beginning in late 2015. By observing these stars in the near-infrared where they are brightest, HPF will be able to search for planets around stars that are currently mostly unexplored. I will discuss the exciting motivation for this search, the techniques we have developed and applied to characterize M dwarfs, and the technical hurdles we are addressing in our development of this high-precision spectrograph.