SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 28. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) have participated in the development of NIRPS, an instrument recently installed on the 3.6 m telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) that is already searching for exoplanets around the cooler stars of the Milky Way from the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The Near InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument has successfully made its first observations. “This incredible infrared instrument will help us find the closest habitable worlds to our Solar System,” says René Doyon, director of the Exoplanet Research Institute at the Université de Montréal and NIRPS Co-Principal Investigator.
“The NIRPS instrument joins a very small number of high-performance near-infrared spectrographs and is a key element for observations in collaboration with those of the James Webb Space Telescope and other ground-based observatories,” adds François Bouchy, a researcher at the University Geneva, Switzerland, and NIRPS Co-Principal Investigator.
The instrument will focus its search on rocky planets, key targets for understanding how this type of celestial object forms and evolves, and on which life is most likely to develop. 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 two to ten times smaller than our Sun.
NIRPS will search for exoplanets using the radial velocity method. When a planet orbits a star, its gravitational pull causes the star to “wobble” slightly. By measuring subtle changes in the star’s light, the NIRPS instrument will help measure the planet’s mass, in addition to its other properties.
“NIRPS will work together with the HARPS instrument, also an exoplanet hunter, extending its range from the visible to the near infrared, ideal for searching for exoplanets similar to Earth around redder stars”, comments Alejandro Suárez, IAC researcher and member of the scientific team. of NIRPS.
Another key difference between the two instruments is that NIRPS will rely on a powerful adaptive optics system, a technique that corrects for the effects of atmospheric turbulence, which causes stars to twinkle, thereby improving its effectiveness in finding and studying exoplanets.
Discoveries made with NIRPS and HARPS will be followed by some of the world’s most powerful observatories, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope and Chile’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (for which similar instruments are being developed). By working together with space and ground-based observatories, NIRPS will be able to obtain clues about the composition of an exoplanet and even search for signs of life in its atmosphere.
“NIRPS will help discover and characterize planets similar to Earth in the solar environment that will be studied in detail with the ELT”, concludes Jonay González, IAC researcher and member of the NIRPS scientific team.
