Fakultät für Physik und Astronomie
STEPHEN PHILLIPS hostreviews.co.uk / UNSPLASH

Looking for Exoplanets around Giant Stars: the Past and the Future

Sabine Reffert , LSW

Our Doppler survey of giant stars at Lick Observatory started in 1999 and ended suddenly in 2011, when the iodine cell which we were using for precise radial velocity determination was damaged. Nevertheless, interesting discoveries still continue to drop out of this rich data set (in total almost 20 000 spectra for a sample of 373 giant stars). I will summarize the most interesting results obtained so far, including individual systems (e.g. planets in spectroscopic binaries, multi-planet systems) as well as statistical results (planet occurrence rate as a function of mass and metallicity). In the second part of my talk, I will present our plans for the future. Doppler monitoring of the sample is expected to resume soon from Koenigstuhl, thanks to the newly-built Waltz Spectrograph. The extension of the survey time span to more than 20 years will allow for the characterizaton of much longer orbits than usually probed by similar surveys, and I will show that we have some very good indications for planetary as well as stellar companions with periods of decades in our sample.

ARI Institute Colloquium
2 Jun 2016, 11:15
ARI Moenchhofstrasse 12-14, Seminar Room 1

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