Early Results from A Global Network of Extremely High Precision Extrasolar Planet Tracker Instruments

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We report early results from two of the Extremely High Precision Extrasolar Planet Tracker Instruments (EXPERT) as part of a global network for hunting for low mass planets in the next decade. The first EXPERT was commissioned at the Kitt Peak 2.1m in September 2009 and the second one is to be commissioned at the LiJiang 2.4m telescope in December 2009. EXPERT is a combination of a thermally compensated monolithic interferometer and a high throughput cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph with a spectral resolution of R=18,000. It covers 0.39-0.7 μm in a single exposure. The commissioning data shows that we have reached a Doppler precision of about 1 m/s for a solar type star with S/N 100 per pixel using an early version of data pipeline with iodine absorption calibration (0.5-0.6 μm only), which is consistent with our original design. We also achieved slightly better than R=18,000 spectral resolution, about 10 mK temperature stability over a few days, a total detection efficiency of 18.8% from the telescope fiber tip to the detector at 0.55 μm. The final predicted Doppler precision based on ThAr calibration being developed to cover the entire operating wavelengths is about 0.5 m/s. Our goal is to populate six 2 meter class telescopes with the EXPERT instruments across the globe to have more than 90% duty cycle for time sensitive extremely high precision Doppler measurements such as hunting for Earth like rocky planets and studying stellar oscillations. The network will also be used for following up planet candidates from the on-going SDSS-III Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS) and space missions.
We acknowledge support from W.M. Keck Foundation, NSF, Chinese NSF, UF and the LiJET consortium.

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