Travelling today to Cambridge to meet with the HARPS-3 / Terra Hunting consortium. We are building a new spectrograph to search for Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars! #exoplanets ðŸ”
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So, what is HARPS-3? Its the third generation of the HARPS instrument, a spectrograph designes to measure extremely precise radial velocities of nearby stars. It will be installed later this year at the Isaac Newton Telescope of Roque de los Muchachos observatory (La Palma) ðŸ”#exoplanets
With HARPS-3 we will perform the Terra Hunting Experiment, in which we will study ~40 nearby stars for 10 years. We will observe them every night to catch all effects related to stellar activity, clean them, and detect the tiny signals of long-period low-mass planets ðŸ”#exoplanets
That's always a hard question to answer for every project and depends on the goals of the project. We want to maximise detections, so the targets are and picked to be the most promising. Bright, long periods of visibility from the telescope, and low levels of stellar activity
M-dwarfs are actually very good in termas of detections. Most known Earth-like planets orbit M-dwarfs. But in this case we aim for planets in stars more similar to the Sun.
The target list is not yet finalized. Tau Ceti might get in as a calibration star. Now that we know It is almost pole on, It is not that interesting anymore. Eps Eri is very hard, but might get in due to its brightness.
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Is HARPS-3 expected to be better than ESPRESSO? Interesting work!!
Happy Hunting!
And thank you. All my admiration!