Title:

Planets around M dwarfs: what can they tell us?



Thierry Forveille
Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble



Abstract:

Variations in planetary properties with the mass of the
central star represent a powerful probe of planetary
formation mechanisms: planets orbiting lower mass mass stars
were formed in a (presumably) lower-mass disk, with an ice
boundary much closer to the star, and at a longer orbital
period (for the same separation) than the planets formed
around more massive stars, and planetary formation is
extremely sensitive to all three parameters.

The vast majority of the ~250 extrasolar planets known to
date orbit solar type stars, mostly as a result of strong
observational biases, but ongoing surveys of both higher and
lower mass stars are starting to show that their planetary
populations are quite different. I'll concentrate on the
lower mass part of the diagram, M dwarfs, and mostly on the
results of our M dwarf planet search program with the HARPS
spectrograph on the ESO 3.6 telescope.