All sky extrasolar planet searches with multi-object dispersed fixed-delay interferometer in optical and near IR

Jian Ge, Suvrath Mahadevan, Julian Van Eyken, Curtis Dewitt, Jerry Friedman, Deqing Ren

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

An all sky survey for extrasolar planets with wide field telescopes, Sloan 2.5m and WIYN 3.5 telescopes, is being developed. This survey will use a multi-object version of current Exoplanet Tracker (ET) Doppler instrument commissioned at the KPNO 2.1m telescope in June 2004. This instrument is based on dispersed fixed-delay interferometer, a combination of a Michelson interferometer with a moderate dispersion spectrometer (Ge 2002). This custom designed instrument (f/2 optics) has a wavelength coverage of ∼ 600 Å with a 4k×4k CCD camera at a spectral resolution of R = 5,000. The measured instrument detection efficiency, including telescope, fiber, interferometer, spectrometer and detector losses, has ∼ 18% (or 50% throughput from the fiber input to the detector), more than 4 times higher than current echelle instruments being used for planet detection. ET has been able to routinely obtain S/N ∼ 80 data for V ∼ 8 mag. stars in 15 min exposures with the KPNO 2.1m. It allows us to reach ∼3.5 m/s Doppler precision for radial velocity (RV) stable stars with S/N ∼ 120 per pixel. It also allows us to confirm an exoplanet curve of HD 130322 (V = 8.05) with rms Doppler error of 12.3 m/s (preliminary results). We are in the middle of design of two prototype multiple object RV instrument for the Sloan and WIYN telescopes, which are capable of observing 50 stars (V ∼ 8-13) in a single exposure. We plan to conduct the all sky survey for planets around ∼ 1 millions of stars with Sloan starting in 2008. Our goal is to identify ∼ 100,000 extrasolar planets with ∼ 1,000 solar analogues through this survey.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)711-718
Number of pages8
JournalProceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
Volume5492
Issue numberPART 2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
EventGround-based Instrumentation for Astronomy - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: Jun 21 2004Jun 25 2004

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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