Sound and fury: finding planets amidst the noise of their dying stars

This project will examine the interaction between stars and planets, as stars expand to become larger than the Sun. The stars gradually destroy their planetary systems, which in turn affects the expanding stars. By developing affordable single-mode spectrographs for small telescopes, we will monitor 300 southern giant stars in the Solar neighborhood for radial velocity variations with a 5 meter per second precision. This will both enable us to determine the elusive stellar mass of these systems through their surface oscillations, and will allow us to compare the modified solar systems around these dying stars to their younger counterparts, hereby characterizing the interaction between star and planet.