HARPS-N , the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere is a high-precision radial-velocity spectrograph , installed at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo , a 3.58-metre telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, Canary Islands , Spain.
8-682: HARPS-N is the counterpart for the Northern Hemisphere of the similar HARPS instrument installed on the ESO 3.6 m Telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. It allows for planetary research in the northern sky which hosts the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. In particular it allows for detailed follow up research to Kepler mission planet candidates, which are located in the Cygnus constellation region. The instrument's main scientific goals are
16-419: A thorium lamp are observed simultaneously using two identical optic fibre feeds, and to careful attention to mechanical stability: the instrument sits in a vacuum vessel which is temperature-controlled to within 0.01 kelvins. The precision and sensitivity of the instrument is such that it incidentally produced the best available measurement of the thorium spectrum. Planet-detection is in some cases limited by
24-528: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . HARPS The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher ( HARPS ) is a high-precision echelle planet-finding spectrograph installed in 2002 on the ESO's 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile . The first light was achieved in February 2003. HARPS has discovered over 130 exoplanets to date, with the first one in 2004, making it
32-534: The seismic pulsations of the star observed rather than by limitations of the instrument. The principal investigator on the HARPS is Michel Mayor who, along with Didier Queloz and Stéphane Udry , have used the instrument to characterize the Gliese 581 planetary system , home to one of the smallest known exoplanets orbiting a normal star, and two super-Earths whose orbits lie in the star's habitable zone . It
40-703: The Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh , the Queen's University Belfast , the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica . First light on sky was obtained by HARPS-N on March 27, 2012, and official operations started on August 1, 2012. This astronomy -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This spectroscopy -related article
48-637: The discovery and characterization of terrestrial super-Earths by combining the measurements using transit photometry and doppler spectroscopy which provide both, the size and mass of the exoplanet. Based on the resulting density, rocky (terrestrial) Super-Earths can be distinguished from gaseous exoplanets. The HARPS-N Project is a collaboration between the Geneva Observatory (lead), the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge ( Massachusetts ),
56-516: The most successful planet finder behind the Kepler space telescope . It is a second-generation radial-velocity spectrograph, based on experience with the ELODIE and CORALIE instruments. The HARPS can attain a precision of 0.97 m/s (3.5 km/h), making it one of only two instruments worldwide with such accuracy. This is due to a design in which the target star and a reference spectrum from
64-477: Was initially used for a survey of one-thousand stars. Since October 2012 the HARPS spectrograph has the precision to detect a new category of planets: habitable super-Earths. This sensitivity was expected from simulations of stellar intrinsic signals, and actual observations of planetary systems. Currently, the HARPS can detect habitable super-Earth only around low-mass stars as these are more affected by gravitational tug from planets and have habitable zones close to
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