Red Dots: The Live Search for Terrestrial Planets

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bystander
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Red Dots: The Live Search for Terrestrial Planets

Post by bystander » Tue Jun 20, 2017 1:55 pm

Red Dots: The Live Search for Terrestrial Planets
ESO Announcement | 2017 Jun 19
[img3="Credit: ESO/Red Dots"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/ann17036a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The team behind the Pale Red Dot campaign, who last year discovered a planet around the closest star to our Sun (eso1629), are resuming their search for Earth-like planets and launching another initiative today. The Red Dots campaign will follow the astronomers as they use ESO’s exoplanet-hunter to look for planets around some of our nearest stellar neighbours: Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, and Ross 154. ESO is joining this Open Notebook Science experiment — real science presented in real time — that will give the public and the scientific community access to observational data from Proxima Centauri as the campaign unfolds.

The scientific team led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé from Queen Mary University of London will acquire and analyse data from ESO’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and other instruments across the globe over approximately 90 nights. Photometric observations began on 15 June and spectrographic observations start on 21 June. ...

Among the stars targeted by Red Dots will be Proxima Centauri, which scientists suspect has more than one terrestrial planet in orbit around it. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our Sun, only 4.2 light-years away. It may be one of the most suitable places to look for life beyond our Solar System, as our instruments and technologies advance. ...

The other two stars observed during the Red Dots campaign are Barnard's star, a low mass red dwarf almost 6 light-years away, and Ross 154, another red dwarf, 9.7 light-years away. Barnard’s star is a popular star in science fiction culture and has also been proposed as the target for future interstellar missions such as the Daedalus project. ...

Joining the Dots: Follow Astronomers' New Hunt for Earth-like Planets
Queen Mary University, London | 2017 Jun 19

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