MEarth Ongoing

摘要

On a mountaintop in Arizona, eight remote-controlled robotic telescopes search the skies every night for transits around M dwarfs. The most common stars in our galaxy, M dwarfs are much smaller than the sun, so the dip in their brightness due to a transiting planet should be larger than the dimming of a sun-sized star. In 2009, MEarth discovered its first super-Earth, a planet orbiting a red dwarf 40 light-years from us.