
Debra Fischer of Yale and Geoff Marcy of U.C. Berkeley, the most successful planet-hunting team on Earth, are once again pushing the boundaries of planet hunting. Armed with a $40,000 grant from the Planetary Society, they built an innovative instrument they call the “Fiber-optic Improved Next-generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths,” or, more simply, FINDS-ExoEarths. The new instrument has already proven its value: when attached to the three-meter telescope at California's Lick Observatory, it greatly improved the telescope's sensitivity and its ability to detect lower-mass exoplanets than before.
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