General Physics Colloquium Wed. 27 May 15:15-16:00 Fys. Aud. Title: "The Search For 100 Earths" Speaker: Debra Fischer, Yale Abstract: The search for exoplanets is motivated by the question of whether life exists elsewhere. This drives our interest in the detection of planets that are similar to our own world: rocky planets with the potential for liquid surface water and plate tectonics; worlds that might harbor life that we can recognize. Importantly, we will need to discover not just a few, but hundreds of these worlds to eventually gain a statistical understanding of whether life is rare, common, or ubiquitous. Doppler measurements with ground-based telescopes offer an ideal platform for carrying out decade-long surveys, but the state of the art measurement precision is a factor of ten away from the precision that we need to detect Earth analogs. I will discuss the technical challenges to very high precision radial velocity precision and our plans for reaching 10 cm/s measurement precision with frequency combs and extremely high spectral resolution spectroscopy. This experiment will be carried out in a "Search for 100 Earths" at the Discovery Channel Telescope using our next generation spectrograph, EXPRES. Wine and cheese will be served at 4pm