With our method, over the next 10 years it could increase the number of new planets discovered to 10,000 or more.

This is one of the youngest stars ever identified with a planetary companion.

A major problem with spectrographs is that they collect only a small percentage of photons from the target light source, which means that they are only useful to search for distant planets when mounted on relatively large telescopes.

This research allows us to know how [planets] form and how they evolve. It makes us better understand our universe.

Discovery of new planets will help to understand how the solar system formed and evolved to current status and also how life forms in the solar system and universe.

We hope to search hundreds of thousands of stars in the next decade, for about 10,000 planets.

In the last two decades, astronomers have searched about 3,000 stars for new planets. Our success with this new instrument shows that we will soon be able to search stars much more quickly and cheaply -- perhaps as many as a couple of hundred thousand stars in the next two decades.