Looking for New Worlds

Time is money, even in the search for planets outside our solar system. While the list of potential exoplanets grows by a few every day, it usually takes several days before a candidate exoplanet can also be confirmed. In the beginning of June, when we visited astrophysicist and exoplanet hunter Khalid Barkaoui at his workplace at the science campus of the University of Liège, he was analyzing observations of a star located some hundreds of light years from Earth. The observations were made with the robotic telescopes of the SPECULOOS project (Search for habitable Planets Eclipsing ULtracOOl Stars) located in Chile, Tenerife, and Mexico. The project aims to find Earth-like planets that lie in the habitable zone of red dwarfs – relatively cold and small stars.