Super-Earths and Neptune-mass planets: a window to planetary-system diversity
Stéphane Udry
Université de Genève

I will report on the results of an 8-year survey carried out at the La Silla Observatory with the HARPS spectrograph to detect and characterize planets in the super-Earth and Neptune-mass regime. The size of our star sample and the precision achieved with HARPS have led to the detection of a sufficiently large number of low-mass planets to study the statistical properties of their orbital elements, the correlation of host-star properties with the planet masses, as well as the occurrence rate of planetary systems around solar-type stars. These results will be discussed in comparison with equivalent results obtained in our M-dwarf survey and with the recent Kepler findings.

Date:	Mercredi, 21 novembre 2012
Time:	11:30
Where:	Université de Montréal
	Pavillon Roger-Gaudry, local D-460
Contact:	René Doyon