At San Francisco State, Professor Debra Fischer leads a research team engaged in the search for extrasolar planets and determining the chromospheric activity of stars. Specific projects that the group is currently involved in include:
- Spectroscopic Analysis of planet search stars
- The Search for Short Period Planets "N2K"
- The Lick Observatory Planet Search
- Automated Planet Finder
- Alpha Centauri
- The search for hot Neptunes
To get an idea of the rate of discovery of exoplanets, the known planets outside of our solar system in 1996 along with the inner planets in our solar system for comparison were:
And the number of known exoplanets at some point in 2008 was:
