A biography for Debra Fischerhasn’t been written yet.
“Further ahead, I'd like to see tiny spacebots - smaller than your cell phone - travel outside our solar system to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. By keeping the mass of those spacebots low, we could more easily accelerate them.”
“55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.”
“It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.”
“Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without.”
“The first exoplanet to be found around a sun-like star was discovered in 1995, just two years before I began studying exoplanet detection.”
“One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.”
“Generally speaking, exoplanets can be any size, and they are found in a wide range of orbits. Some have massive gas atmospheres; others are smaller with an icy or rocky composition.”
“Because Alpha Centauri is so close, it is our first stop outside our solar system. There's almost certain to be small, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.”
“The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe.”
“A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.”
“In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.”
“It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets.”