ESO Organization Release | 2018 Jan 24
[img3="The ExTrA telescopes at La Silla - Credit: ESO/Emmanuela Rimbaud"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1803a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]A new national facility at ESO’s La Silla Observatory has successfully made its first observations. The ExTrA telescopes will search for and study Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby red dwarf stars. ExTrA’s novel design allows for much improved sensitivity compared to previous searches. Astronomers now have a powerful new tool to help in the search for potentially habitable worlds.
The newest addition to ESO’s La Silla observatory in northern Chile, Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres (ExTrA), has made its first successful observations. ExTrA is designed to search for planets around nearby red dwarf stars and study their properties. ExTrA is a French project funded by the European Research Council and the French Agence National de la Recherche. The telescopes will be operated remotely from Grenoble, France.
To detect and study exoplanets, ExTrA uses three 0.6-metre telescopes [1]. They regularly monitor the amount of light received from many red dwarf stars and look for a slight dip in brightness that could be caused by a planet passing — transiting — across a star’s disc and obscuring some of its light. ...
