ESO: New Exoplanet-hunting Telescopes on Paranal

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ESO: New Exoplanet-hunting Telescopes on Paranal

Post by bystander » Wed Jan 14, 2015 5:55 pm

New Exoplanet-hunting Telescopes on Paranal
ESO | Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) | 2015 Jan 14
The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) has achieved first light at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. This project will search for transiting exoplanets — planets that pass in front of their parent star and hence produce a slight dimming of the star’s light that can be detected by sensitive instruments. The telescopes will focus on discovering Neptune-sized and smaller planets, with diameters between two and eight times that of Earth.

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a wide-field observing system made up of an array of twelve telescopes, each with an aperture of 20 centimetres [1]. This new facility, built by a UK, Swiss and German consortium, is located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile and benefits from the superb observing conditions and excellent support facilities available at this site. ...

NGTS is designed to operate in a robotic mode and it will continuously monitor the brightness of hundreds of thousands of comparatively bright stars in the southern skies. It is searching for transiting exoplanets and will reach a level of accuracy in measuring the brightness of stars — one part in a thousand — that has never before been attained with a ground-based wide-field survey instrument [2]. ...
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