Debra Ann Fischer

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut ~Professor of Astronomy. Internationally renowned exoplanet hunter whose group has discovered more than 200 planetary systems around stars other than the Sun, including the first known multiple planet system (in 1999) and five-planet system (in 2005). In a major study in 2003-2008, her group discovered fifty planets orbiting metal-rich stars (i.e., those in which elements such as carbon and oxygen are abundant), confirming her signature discovery that more chemically evolved stars are far more likely to have orbiting planets than stars with lower metallicity. Finding has important implications for how planets-including Earth and similar planets-form. Determined whether certain (transiting) planets are rocky like Earth or Mars or gaseous giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Now designing a next-generation spectrograph to improve, by an order of magnitude, the mass limit of detected exoplanets (through more precise measurement of tiny periodic Doppler shifts in a star's radial velocity caused by the orbit of an otherwise invisible exoplanet).~