A fully robotic telescope called the Automated Planet Finder, or APF, has made its first detection of two planets that could change the way we find planetary neighbors in the future. Graduate student Lauren Weiss leads the search at the University of California, Berkeley, and says her team has been able to catch up on sleep thanks to the fully automated APF.

"So, we decided to automate the telescope so we graduate students could get more sleep and work on other science and data analysis, instead of just staying awake all the time."

Weiss says that the APF will look for low-mass planets five to ten times the mass of Earth. And because it can search every night, the APF will significantly speed up the search for new planets.

"We estimate that within the next three to five years, we will have as much scientific data from the Automated Planet Finder, as we’ve gathered in the past twenty years, on the Keck telescope."