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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the blind-but-now-it-can-see dept.

The Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet- and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) has begun operations at the Very Large Telescope in Chile:

A new exoplanet-hunting instrument, attached to one of the world's largest telescopes, has seen its first glimpse of the sky, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced today. The Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) detects exoplanets by measuring shifts in the spectrum of light from stars caused by the gravity of planets tugging on them. For this technique, the signal of the stellar wobble is bigger for more massive planets in closer orbits. ESPRESSO, with improved spectral resolution, a wider wavelength range, and fixed to ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal in Chile, hopes to discern the fainter tugs of planets with Earth-like masses and orbits.

"It's the most mature facility in the world of this kind," says astronomer Didier Queloz of Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, co-discoverer of the first exoplanet around a normal star in 1995. [...] The previous generation of spectrographs could reach stellar wobbles of around 1 meter per second—a slow walking pace. Jupiter, for example, shifts the sun by 13 meters per second, but Earth's much weaker tug only achieves a velocity of 9 centimeters per second. ESPRESSO, at the forefront of the new generation, aims to put Earth-like planets within reach, with a sensitivity of 10 centimeters per second or even slower. "We're the first to be mad enough to try to achieve that," says lead scientist Francesco Pepe of the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

An exact twin of Earth is probably out of reach, but ESPRESSO should be able to detect super-Earths three or four times heavier than Earth that orbit sun-like stars. It may also detect Earth-sized planets around smaller stars, where a weaker tug achieves more movement.

ESPRESSO is roughly three times more sensitive than HARPS. The CODEX spectrograph attached to the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) should be about five times more sensitive than ESPRESSO. The ELT's first light is scheduled for 2024.

Also at Space.com.


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Related Stories

Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time 9 comments

ESO's Very Large Telescope has combined the light from all four of its Unit Telescopes into its ESPRESSO instrument for the first time, effectively creating a 16 meter aperture optical telescope:

The ESPRESSO instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile has for the first time been used to combine light from all four of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. Combining light from the Unit Telescopes in this way makes the VLT the largest optical telescope in existence in terms of collecting area.

One of the original design goals of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) was for its four Unit Telescopes (UTs) to work together to create a single giant telescope. With the first light of the ESPRESSO spectrograph using the four-Unit-Telescope mode of the VLT, this milestone has now been reached.

After extensive preparations by the ESPRESSO consortium (led by the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, with the participation of research centres from Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) and ESO staff, ESO's Director General Xavier Barcons initiated this historic astronomical observation with the push of a button in the control room.

[...] Light from the four Unit Telescopes is routinely brought together in the VLT Interferometer for the study of extremely fine detail in comparatively bright objects. But interferometry, which combines the beams "coherently", cannot exploit the huge light-gathering potential of the combined telescopes to study faint objects.

Previously: First Light for VLT's ESPRESSO Exoplanet Hunter


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Proxima Centauri b Confirmed Using VLT's ESPRESSO, Possible Third Exoplanet Found in System 3 comments

Proxima Centauri b confirmed as nearest exoworld

Four years ago, scientists made one of the most exciting exoplanet discoveries so far, a rocky planet similar in size to Earth orbiting the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri. While the detection seemed solid, more confirmation is always good, and now the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile has provided that extra and more detailed confirmation. The news was announced by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) on May 28, 2020.

[...] Proxima Centauri b is very similar in size to Earth, with a mass of 1.17 Earth masses. It orbits its star in only 11.2 days, in contrast to our Earth's year-long orbit around our sun. That means Proxima Centauri b is a lot closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But, because the star is a red dwarf – much smaller and cooler than our sun – its orbit is indeed within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri. Interestingly, Proxima Centauri b receives about the same amount of solar energy from its star that Earth does from our sun.

[...] The mass of Proxima b was previously estimated to be 1.3 Earth masses. The accuracy of the new measurement of 1.17 Earth masses is unprecedented, according to Michel Mayor, the "architect" of all ESPRESSO-type instruments:

ESPRESSO has made it possible to measure the mass of the planet with a precision of over one-tenth of the mass of Earth. It's completely unheard of.

The new confirmation of Proxima Centauri b is exciting, but there may be more surprises in store ... there is also possible evidence of another and smaller planet in the newest data. A secondary detection was also made, although it isn't certain whether it is actually a planet. If it is, it is even smaller than Proxima Centauri b. [...] If it is a planet, it would be more akin to Mars or Mercury in size and mass – estimated at a minimum Earth mass of 0.29 ± 0.08 – and orbits the star in only 5.15 days. It wouldn't be too surprising, though, in that low-mass stars like red dwarfs tend to have multiple planets in their systems. More observations will be required to either confirm or refute this possible second planet.

Journal Reference
Mascareño, A. Suárez, Faria, J. P., Figueira, P., et al. Revisiting Proxima with ESPRESSO, (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12114v1)

Proxima Centauri - Planetary system

Previously: ESO Confirms Reports of Proxima Centauri Exoplanet
Proxima b May Have Oceans
Dust Belts and Possible Additional Exoplanet Spotted Around Proxima Centauri
First Light for VLT's ESPRESSO Exoplanet Hunter
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
Proxima Centauri's No Good, Very Bad Day
High Levels of Ultraviolet Radiation Should Not Preclude Life on Exoplanets
Icy second planet potentially spotted orbiting Proxima Centauri


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