Sunday, July 5, 2015

High Precision Photometry of Transiting Exoplanets as I currently know it : Part IV

Instrumentation for Observation

 

MINERVA

As stated in Part I, I will use the MINERVA telescopes to obtain the high precision photometry that I desire.  MINERVA stands for MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array.  The system consists of four 0.7 m telescopes capable of high-resolution spectroscopy and photometry.  They are currently located on Mt. Hopkins in Arizona.

Each telescope is a product of PlaneWave Instruments.  You will find on this web page the description and price of the optical design for each of the MINERVA telescopes.  Purchasing four relatively small telescopes as opposed to buying one with a large diameter saved Harvard Professor John Johnson and his colleagues a few million dollars.  The concept of using four telescopes is beneficial to my current research project as well.  I will discuss why this is in later segments of this High Precision Photometry series of blog posts.  Furthermore, the four distinct telescopes have advantages beneficial to the Mission Statement of the MINERVA observatory.  

Simply and concisely put, the purpose of constructing the MINERVA observatory is to find, confirm and characterize low mass exoplanets within our Solar Neighborhood.  Exoplanets that transit their parent stars are the most convenient to detect and provide the most information about the stellar-planet system.  This project intends to primarily search for planets that are at close-in orbits to their host stars.  This is due to the fact that planets with shorter distances away from their parent star have a much higher probability of transiting, with respect to Earth's line of sight.  (See Parts I and II about Non-transit and Transiting exoplanets.)

A convenient way to find transiting exoplanets with modern technology is to observe bright stars, which should have an apparent decrease in flux when measured with instruments on Earth like MINERVA.  What makes this task a challenging one is the fact that the hundreds of exoplanets discovered thus far, typically, are not as large as a planet like Jupiter.  Planets that are larger in regards to radius would, of course, block out more light when transiting their parent star.  However, there are more planets with a radius < \(4R_{\oplus}\) than there are larger ones in our Milky Way Galaxy.  This means that a project dedicated to finding exoplanets should certainly be equipped to find planets with a relatively small radius (~Earth size) and low mass.  

So, how does MINERVA (a ground-based observatory) differ from the Kepler Mission?  Furthermore, why am I looking for "High Precision" measurements from this MINERVA observatory and not the space-based Kepler data?
These questions and more will be answered next.  In the meanwhile, enjoy this video of the MINERVA telescopes after they became thoroughly installed and operational on Mt. Hopkins.

 
A drone flies over and films the telescopes.  The 5th, lonely telescope is the newest addition to the array.  You'll even see one of my advisors Jason Eastman in the left clam shell dome! 


to be continued...

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