Low cost exoplanet hunting and gathering

A number of projects are showing that finding and studying exoplanets can be done with relatively low cost systems:   : Brave new world-hunters spot exoplanets on the cheap – New Scientist.

Such systems do not replace the space-based observatories like Kepler or the ground-based work by giant telescopes. These systems can look at thousands of stars with high resolution and sensitivity. Instead, the small guys can focus for long periods on just a handful of star systems. This can be done to hunt for new exoplanets or to gather more information on those found by the big systems.

Since Kepler’s staggering number of finds implied most stars probably have planets, astronomers are increasingly aiming for detailed planet studies instead of just making discoveries, Johnson says.

“This is no longer the day of swashbuckling scientists trying to get as many kills as possible,” [Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz,] says. “There is so much great science just sitting on the floor… with the Kepler statistics in hand, we’re no longer in the area of planet hunting. We’re in the era of planet gathering.”

For example, there is the Minerva exoplanet observatory, which describes itself as follows –

Minerva will be an array of small-aperture robotic telescopes outfitted for both photometry and high-resolution spectroscopy. It will be the first U.S. observatory dedicated to exoplanetary science capable of both precise radial velocimetry and transit studies. The multi-telescope concept will be implemented to either observe separate targets or a single target with a larger effective aperture. The flexibility of the observatory will maximize scientific potential and also provide ample opportunities for education and public outreach. The design and implementation of Minerva will be carried out by postdoctoral and student researchers at Caltech.

The primary science goal of Minerva is to discover Earth-like planets in close-in (less than 50-day) orbits around nearby stars, and super-Earths (3-15 times the mass of Earth) in the habitable zones of the closest Sun-like stars. The secondary goal will be to look for transits (eclipses) of known and newly-discovered extrasolar planets, which provide information about the radii and interior structures of the planets….

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Aqawan 1 and Telescope 1 at the Caltech
commissioning site. Image credit: M. Wong

Such a system is even accessible for (wealthy) amateurs. From the NS article:

Minerva uses four 0.7-metre-wide, 2.5-metre-tall commercial telescopes built by a company called PlaneWave, which also sells them to hobbyists for about $200,000 – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought one just before Minerva’s team.

The Mearth Project is another exoplanet observatory using arrays of off-the-shelf telescopes.

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There is also the HATNet Exoplanet Survey (Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network) project.

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HATNet telescopes located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO)
on Mount Hopkins in Arizona, USA (5 telescopes),