Finds Exo-Earths

Rent the Night Sky!

Are there super-Earth or Earth-sized planets in orbit around Alpha Centauri A or B?

We can find out for $33,000—or $1,650 a night.

To view Alpha Centauri the telescope must be in the southern hemisphere for Debra Fisher and our FINDS Exo-earths team, so we need to rent time at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile

Please make a donation to sponsor as much telescope time as you can to study the mysteries of Alpha Centauri! The Planetary Society is hunting for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars...

Finds Exo-Earths

The Planetary Society had teamed up with planet hunters Debra Fischer of Yale University and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley to help with the quest to find other "Earths," other worlds like our own, elsewhere in our galaxy.

The project is called FINDS Exo-Earths (which stands for Fiber-optic Improved Next generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths).

This high-end optical system was installed on the 3-meter telescope at the Lick Observatory and dramatically increased discoveries of smaller exoplanets and has been playing a crucial role in verifying Earth-sized planet candidates from the Kepler planet-hunter mission.

This is exactly the kind of project the Society has always excelled at. It's a small, vital effort, overlooked and under-valued by the space community's "Powers That Be." And we can see that it offers an incredible cost-benefit ratio.

Project Updates

Planets around Alpha Centauri?

Posted by Bruce Betts on 2012/04/24 12:03 CDT | 1 comments

Do planets circle our closest stellar neighbors, the system loved by science fiction: Alpha Centauri? We don’t know. But, Debra Fischer, Julien Spronck, and their colleagues at Yale University, in part with Planetary Society support, are trying to find out.