The MEarth-North and MEarth-South transit surveys: searching for habitable super-Earth exoplanets around nearby M-dwarfs

Abstract

Detection and characterization of potentially habitable Earth-size extrasolar planets is one of the major goals of contemporary astronomy. By applying the transit method to very low-mass M-dwarfs, it is possible to find these planets from the ground with present-day instrumentation and observational techniques. The MEarth project is one such survey with stations in both hemispheres: MEarth-North at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Mount Hopkins, Arizona, and MEarth-South at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile. We present an update on recent results of this survey, for planet occurrence rates, and interesting stellar astrophysics, for which our sample of 3000 nearby mid-to-late M-dwarfs has been very fruitful. All light curves gathered during the survey are made publicly available after one year, and we describe how to access and use these data.

5 pages, 2 figures. To appear in 18th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun, Proceedings of Lowell Observatory (9-13 June 2014). Public data releases (including Data Release 3, 2014 September 1) are available at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/MEarth/Data.html