The MEarth project

Largest data-set spans October 2008 – June 2009 (inclusive)
- 20 minute cadence, 715nm long-pass filter
- Targets M3 or later, high proper motion selection and < 33pc
- 355 well-observed (> 100 data points over > 10 nights)
– 52 reasonably solid detections of rotation periods
– Very few not variable at level to which we are sensitive
– Majority of the rest are clearly variable but difficult to determine period (spot evolution? systematics? not enough data yet?)

find 3 candidates from these criteria
+ high-cadence follow-up with the MEarth observatory confirmed all three to be true
astrophysical transits/eclipses
+ criteria should be taken as conservative (pure but not necessarily complete!)
+ use them to simulate current sensitivity to believable transits

Title: "New habitable planets around M dwarfs, and 1st radius measurement of a 1-30 M exoplanet"

Scientific program:
"With HARPS observations, we propose to detect:
− 20−30 new very-low mass planets (typically 4 − 16M),
− among which  2 − 3 habitable planets
− and at least one transit of a low-mass planet.
This goal will be achieved by observing 250 M dwarfs with high-frequency observations (one measurement per night during 10 nights). After each observing campaign of 10 nights, the few best candidates will be followed with HARPS during 10 more nights, to i) confirm the discoveries and ii) refine the ephemeris for a photometric transit search.
Such a major increase of the still small sample of very-low-mass planets and/or the first radius measurements of such objects will obviously put unprecedented constraints on our understanding of planetary structure and formation.
The observational effort described in the present proposal ask for half the time required to reach that goal (i.e. 80 nights a needed in total, and 40 nights are asked for P80 and P81)"