Bastien Courcol
Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille

Abstract
Thanks to the continuous improvements of detection techniques, the list of known exoplanets has significantly increased the past twenty years. More specifically new types of planets in the low mass domain, from rocky Super-Earths to gaseous Neptunes, have emerged from both high precision radial velocity surveys and space based surveys. The exploration of this population, its properties, diversity and formation processes has become the objective of many upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO. It will significantly increase the demande for high precision radial velocity (RV) measurements in the next years. To contribute to this effort of characterization of low mass planets, the SOPHIE spectrograph, located on the 1.93-m telescope of Observatoire de Haute Provence, has been improved in June 2011 with the implementation of octagonal-section fibers. With new corrections of instrumental systematics, the RV precision is now close to 2 m/s on all timescales.
I will present in this seminar the first results of a program carried out for several years on SOPHIE that aims at detecting low mass planets and measuring their parameters. This program has also allowed to update the parameters of some known low-mass exoplanets. I will also discuss these results in the context of the Neptune to Super-Earth transition, especially regarding host star metallicity. Finally, I will present the synergy of our SOPHIE programs with the incoming CHEOPS mission as well as the ongoing improvements of SOPHIE to ultimately reach the 1m/s precision.

10 December 2015, 13:30

Centro de Astrofísica
Rua das Estrelas
4150-762 Porto