Published June 27, 2022 by Marie-Eve Naud
Leave a comment
The Near InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument, developed in part at the Université de Montréal and Université Laval, successfully made its first observations. Mounting the ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, NIRPS’s mission is to search for new exoplanets around stars in the solar quarter.
This photo shows the NIRPS instrument and its adaptive optical system, which is installed on the ESO 3.6-meter telescope. The light collected by the telescope is directed through a series of mirrors before being injected into an optical fiber. Thanks to this adaptive-optical system, disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere can be corrected, which allows for sharper observations. Credit: N. Blind (Observatoire de Genève) / NIRPS / ESO consortium.
“NIRPS has been around for a long time, and I’m excited about how this mission came together,” said Rene Doyon, director of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and the Institute for Exoplanetary Research, Université de Montréal, and co-researcher of NIRPS. “This amazing infrared instrument will help us find the closest inhabitable worlds to our own solar system.
The tool will focus its search on rocky worlds, which are key goals for understanding how planets form and evolve and are the most likely planets where life can evolve. NIRPS will search for these rocky exoplanets around small, cool red dwarf stars – the most common type of star in our Milky Way galaxy, which have masses about two to ten times smaller than our Sun.
NIRPS will search for exoplanets using the radial velocity method. As the planet orbits a star, its gravitational pull causes the star to “sway” slightly, causing the light to shift to red or blue as it moves away from or toward Earth. By measuring subtle changes in starlight, NIRPS will help astronomers measure the planet’s mass as well as other properties.
NIRPS will look for these spectral oscillations using near-infrared light, as this is the main range of wavelengths emitted by such small, cool stars. He joins the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in the hunt for new rocky worlds. HARPS, which has been installed on ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile since 2003, also uses the radial velocity method, but works with visible light. Using both tools at the same time will provide a more comprehensive analysis of these rocky worlds.
Another key difference between the two instruments is that NIRPS will rely on a powerful adaptive optical system. Adaptive optics is a technique that corrects the effects of atmospheric turbulence that make stars twinkle. Using it, NIRPS will double its effectiveness in both finding and studying exoplanets.
“NIRPS joins a very small number of high-performance near-infrared spectrographs and is expected to be a key player for observations in synergy with space missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based observatories,” added Francois Bushi of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. NIRPS researcher.
The discoveries made with NIRPS and HARPS will be followed by some of the most powerful observatories in the world, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope in Chile (for which similar instruments are being developed). Working with space and ground-based observatories, NIRPS will be able to gather clues about the composition of the exoplanet and even look for signs of life in its atmosphere.
In order to operate in the infrared range, the Near Infrared Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument must be kept extremely cool to prevent heat from interfering with the observations. Here we see the cylindrical cryogenic chamber in which the optical parts of the instrument are mounted. The cryogenic chamber keeps the components in a vacuum environment and cooled to freezing -190 degrees Celsius. Credit: F. Bouchy (Observatoire de Genève) / NIRPS / ESO consortium.
NIRPS is made up of international collaboration led by the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and the team of the Institute for Exoplanetary Research at the Université de Montréal in Canada and the Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève in Switzerland. Much of the mechanical and optical assembly and testing of the instrument has been performed in the last few years in the laboratories of the Center for Optics, Photonics and Lasers (COPL) at Laval University by Prof. Simon Thibault and his team. The Herzberg National Research Council of the Canadian Research Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics contributed to the concept and construction of the spectrograph.
“After two years of integrating and testing the instrument in the lab, it’s amazing for the optical engineer’s team to see NIRPS in the sky,” said Prof. Simon Thibault, who is involved in COPL and iREx and who reviewed the phases of optical integration and testing at Université. Laval.
Here we see the first raw data from the NIRPS instrument, the spectrum of the Barnard star. Each horizontal line corresponds to a narrow region of light, where both the absorption lines of the star and the absorption lines of the Earth’s atmosphere are visible. The dotted lines correspond to the so-called crest spectrum, a “ruler” that is used as a reference for horizontal lines so that scientists can know which wavelengths of light they correspond to. Credit: ESO / NIRPS consortium.
Many Canadian NIRPS members have worked on site at La Silla during the commissioning period of the instrument and will continue to do so over the next few months to ensure NIRPS ‘scientific operations. The NIRPS research team, which includes several Canadian astronomers, is guaranteed 720 instrument nights during the first 5 years of operation due to their important contribution to the project. While the whole team was excited about the first light of NIRPS, it is safe to say that the best is yet to come!
More info
The institutes included in the NIRPS consortium are Université de Montréal, Canada; the University of Geneva, Astronomical Observatory, Switzerland; Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Porto, Portugal; Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain; University of Grenoble, France; and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.
The Canadian NIRPS team, led by the Université de Montréal / Institute for the Study of Exoplanets / Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and including Université Laval, the National Research Council of the Canadian Research Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics Herzberg and the Royal Military College received a innovations for building the NIRPS tool.
Contacts
Rene Doyon, Professor, Principal Investigator of NIRPS, Institute for Exoplanetary Research and Mont-Megantic Observatory – Université de MontréalTel: +1 514 343 6111 x3204Email: rene.doyon@umontreal.ca
Frédérique BaronNIRPS Deputy Project Manager Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic – Université de MontréalMontréalTel: +1 514 277 2858Email: frederique.baron@umontreal.ca
Professor Simon Thibaut, Optical Engineering Team, NIRPS Center for Optics, Photonics and Lasers – Université LavalQuébecTel: +1 418 656 2131 x 412766Email: simon.thibault@phy.ulaval.ca
Anne-Sophie Poulin-Girard Research Associate, Optical Engineering Team, NIRPS Center for Optics, Photonics and Lasers – Université LavalQuébecTel: +1 418 656 2131 x 404646Email: anne-sophie.poulin-girard
Natalie Wellett Coordinator Institute for Exoplanetary Research – Université de MontréalTel: +1 613 531 1762Email: nathalie.ouellette.2@umontreal.ca
Links
Connected
← À la découverte des mondes extraterrestres – 24 hours of science
Add Comment