ESPRESSO Telescope Time
We are excited to announce that our group has recently been awarded 73 hours of Very Large Telescope (VLT) time to complete the census of radial velcocity planets around M dwarfs in the solar neighborhood.
Planets around nearby stars will be prime targets for characterisation with upcoming space- and ground based facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Since large-scale exoplanet searches will not be feasible with such telescopes, we must use instruments at current facilities to find planets before next generation facilities come online. M dwarfs have likely been missed in previous radial velocity surveys because they were too faint for spectrographs behind small telescopes like HARPS, but ESPRESSO behind the 8-m diameter VLT can gather enough light to detect planets of 1 - 3 Earth masses in the habitable zone.
The project was initiated by the former group member Anna Boehle and will be carried out by Lia Sartori and Felix Dannert.
Prog ID: 109.22Y9