Searching for planetary transits around M dwarfs with telescope networks

Abstract

As of today, hundreds of extrasolar planets have been discoverd, and thousands of candidates are waiting for confirmation. Although we already have discovered dozens of the least massive planets (the so called super-Earths), only a few have been found to be orbiting low mass stars, and only one that actually transist a bright M star. Here, we propose to carry out a photometric search for transiting super-Earths in the Habitable Zone of a large sample of very low-mass stars (M < 0.3 M⊙). These planets have a higher transit detection probability, shorter orbital periods and produce larger radial velocity amplitudes than those orbiting Solar type stars. The observing strategy proposed for such a search would require a robotic network of 1-m class telescopes, such as the LCOGT will provide.