This project will complete a radial velocity and abundance survey of Solar Twin stars to test models of the importance of stellar metallicity to planet formation processes. The team will use the HARPS instrument and plans to estimate abundances more reliably than before using new observing and data reduction techniques. They have already been awarded four years of time for this project. One focus will be to concentrate on observing lithium and other refractory abundances in stars that greatly resemble the Sun.
Stars and their planets are thought to arise from the same fragment of a collapsed molecular cloud. Consequently, a star's properties likely reflect the physical conditions of the disk its planets formed in, and the study of relationships between planets' and their host stars' characteristics can give insight to the processes that govern planet formation and evolution. The observed strong positive correlation between stellar metallicity and giant planet frequency is an example of such a relationship. In astronomy, metallicity is generally defined as the abundance of all elements other than hydrogen and helium. Broader impacts of the work include training a graduate student in research, incorporating some of the data in undergraduate courses, an international collaboration with scientists in Brazil and Australia, and communicating with the public through articles on exoplanets in popular science magazines.
