Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Precise Radial Velocities for the Future of Exoplanet Detection

Jason Wright

Penn State

As precise radial velocimetry passes the 20 year mark, it remains a fundamental component of the exoplaneteer's toolkit. I will look ahead to the role it will play in its third decade, characterizing the Kepler mission's extraordinary harvest of planetary systems, exploring the Solar neighborhood, and placing the Solar System in cosmic context.

I will describe our strategy with the MINERVA project and at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which proceeds both from the "outside in" and the "inside out". Long-term followup of Kepler systems with inner terrestrial planets will reveal their larger architecture, including the Jupiter analogs that dynamically craft and stabilize planetary orbits. High cadence monitoring of the brightest, nearest, most Sun-like stars will burrow beneath the astrophysical and instrumental noise to reveal the close-in terrestrial planets orbiting stars already known to have outer gas giants.