Detecting Earth-like Planets: Eric Ford’s Interdisciplinary Approach
Eric Ford, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a past fellow of IIAS, has developed a new method for detecting low-mass, potentially Earth-like planets around stars beyond our solar system. Using advanced spectrographs to observe the subtle “wobble”—stellar spectrum variations—of stars caused by orbiting planets, he seeks to identify potential Earth-like […]