San Francisco State University has been a center for extrasolar planet research since the late 1980's. The Planet Search Program began in 1988 when SFSU Professor Geoff Marcy (now at U.C. Berkeley)
and then-SFSU graduate student Paul Butler (Carnegie Inst.) began to search for the first planets outside our solar system using the telescopes at Lick Observatory.
This project is currently being supported at U.C. Berkeley, The Carnegie Institution, U.C. Santa Cruz and San Francisco State and is supported by NASA and the NSF. In the last 10 years, this and similar projects around the world have discovered over 300 extrasolar planets. For more information, please see the project website at exoplanets.org
