More than two decades after the first discovery of exoplanets, the field has moved into the era of finding populations of small planets, including the ones with a rocky composition that is similar to our Earth. Precise radial velocity (PRV) is taking the lead in surveying nearby bright stars for Earth analogs, while playing an important role in following up transiting exoplanets such as those discovered by Kepler (and TESS in the near future). With more than two dozen new PRV spectrographs being commissioned or built, we are now facing many challenges that emerge at the less than 1 m/s level, which is the precision needed for finding and characterizing small, rocky planets. This talk focuses on projects addressing two of the challenges: stellar jitter/activity, and contamination from the Earth's atmosphere. I will also introduce our work with the Planet Finder Spectrograph on Magellan/Clay, including an upcoming Southern hemisphere TESS follow-up survey focusing on understanding the population of small planets.

BIO
Dr. Xuesong Wang (Sharon) is a Carnegie Fellow in Astronomy and Planetary Science at Carnegie DTM in Washington DC. She received her B.S. in Physics at Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University. Her research focuses on improving the radial velocity precision in order to detect Earth-like planets. She is the PI for the RV×K2 and RV×TESS programs to use Kepler/K2 or TESS to investigate stellar RV jitter (rvxk2.com). She is a member of the Magellan Planet Finder Spectrograph team, NASA WIYN-NEID team, and the MINERVA consortium.