The MEarth project: searching for transiting habitable super-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs

TL;DR

The MEarth project aims to detect transiting habitable super-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs using a network of robotic telescopes, focusing on small, bright stars suitable for follow-up studies.

Contribution

This paper introduces the MEarth survey, detailing its design, hardware, and initial results from commissioning data targeting nearby M-dwarfs for transiting super-Earths.

Findings

Survey setup and hardware are operational.

Preliminary data shows potential for detecting transiting planets.

The project is progressing towards identifying habitable exoplanets.

Abstract

Due to their small radii, M-dwarfs are very promising targets to search for transiting super-Earths, with a planet of 2 Earth radii orbiting an M5 dwarf in the habitable zone giving rise to a 0.5% photometric signal, with a period of two weeks. This can be detected from the ground using modest-aperture telescopes by targeting samples of nearby M-dwarfs. Such planets would be very amenable to follow-up studies due to the brightness of the parent stars, and the favourable planet-star flux ratio. MEarth is such a transit survey of ~2000 nearby M-dwarfs. Since the targets are distributed over the entire (Northern) sky, it is necessary to observe them individually, which will be done by using 8 independent 0.4m robotic telescopes, two of which have been in operation since December 2007 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) located on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. We discuss the survey design and hardware, and report on the current status of the survey, and preliminary results obtained from the commissioning data.