Abstract:

A few thousand exoplanets have been identified since the first announcement in 1995. The different discovery techniques complement each other by covering different regions of the planetary orbit versus mass parameter space, and together they seem to indicate a picture where most solar systems are dominated by a few Earth-sized planets in terrestrial orbits or smaller, and where our own solar system represent a quite unusual configuration. The coming SONG telescope network can play a unique role in identifying smaller and more Earth and Mars like planets (in terms of both mass and orbit), in a large volume of Galactic space and independent of stellar types and activity level. I will comment on the present status of the attempts to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence by development of a novel dual EMCCD technique at the SONG Hertzsprung telescope and the Danish 1.54m telescope, in an attempt to fill this niche in the crowded exoplanet discovery space, and other niches.