Commission 30: Radial Velocities

This three-year period has seen considerable activity in the Commission, with a wide range of applications of radial velocities as well as a significant push toward higher precision. The latter has been driven in large part by the exciting research on extrasolar planets. This field is now on the verge of detecting Earth-mass bodies around nearby stars, as demonstrated by recent work summarized below, and radial velocities continue to play a central role.