ESO Organizational Release | 2017 Jul 19
Exoplanet hunter sees first light at ESO’s La Silla Observatory
The MASCARA (Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA) station at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has achieved first light. This new facility will seek out transiting exoplanets as they pass in front of their bright parent stars and create a catalogue of targets for future exoplanet characterisation observations.
[img3="MASCARA planet hunting system at ESO’s La Silla ObservatoryIn June 2016, ESO reached an agreement with Leiden University to site a station of MASCARA at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, taking advantage of the excellent observing conditions of the southern hemisphere skies. This station is now made its first successful test observations.
(Credit: ESO/G. J. Talens)"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1722b.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The MASCARA station in Chile is the second to begin operations; the first station is in the northern hemisphere on the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. Each station contains a battery of cameras in a temperature-controlled enclosure which will monitor almost the entire sky visible from its location [1]. ...
Built by Leiden University in the Netherlands, MASCARA is a planet-hunting instrument. Its very compact and low-cost design appears unassuming, but is innovative, flexible and highly reliable. Consisting of five digital cameras with off-the-shelf components, this small planet-hunter takes repeated measurements of the brightnesses of thousands of stars and uses software to hunt for the slight dimming of a star’s light as a planet crosses the face of the star. ...
The main purpose of MASCARA is to find exoplanets around the brightest stars in the sky, currently not probed either by space or ground-based surveys. The target population for MASCARA consists mostly of “hot Jupiters” — large worlds that are physically similar to Jupiter but orbit very close to their parent star, resulting in high surface temperatures and orbital periods of only a few hours. Dozens of hot Jupiters have been discovered with the radial velocity exoplanet detection method, as they exert a noticeably gravitational influence on their host stars. ...
The Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA (MASCARA): Finding Transiting Exoplanets around Bright (mV<8) Stars - G. J. J. Talens et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics 601:A11 (May 2017) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201630319
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1702.03931 > 13 Feb 2017
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?p=272867#p272867
