Slide 1

July 20 2009 1 ESPRESSO and CODEX the next generation of RV planet hunters at ESO ESO, Geneve Observatory Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias INAF-Trieste and Brera Institute of Astronomy Cambridge University of Lisboa and Porto Luca Pasquini, ESO Slide 2 July 20 20092 CODEX Science Main Cases 1. Dynamical measurement Universal expansion (C2) 2.Extrasolar Twin Earths (S3) 3.Variability of Physical Constants (C3) 4. Metallicity of the low density IGM (C7) 5. Nucleochronometry PRECISION SPECTROSCOPY REQUIRES MANY PHOTONS AT HIGH R: VERY LARGE TELESCOPE APERTURES !! Slide 3 July 20 20093 The HARPS heritage The HARPS spectrograph ( Mayor et al. 2003 ) is the planet hunter operating for 6 years at the ESO 3.6m telescope The HARPS heritage is twofold Scientific Technological Slide 4 July 20 20094 : stability at 1 m/s HARPS: stability at 1 m/s RV =1 m/s =0.00001 A 15 nm 1/10000 pixel fiber fed RV =1 m/s T =0.01 K p=0.01 mBar Pressure controlledTemperature controlled Slide 5 July 20 20095 HARPS Scientific Heritage Aiming at 1 m/s -1 is useless (and you will never succeed) (anonymous, 1998 - 2003) 16/20 Neptune mass planets have been discovered by HARPS in 5 yrs of operations (Bouchy et al. 2009 A&A 496, 527) Slide 6 July 20 20096 A population of low mass planets From the HARPS high precision survey: Newly discovered low mass planet population indicates a quite common (up to 30%) frequency of low mass planets around solar stars (Lovis et al. 2009) Are we at the edge of discovering the predicted large population of terrestrial planets ? HARPS bias? Mordasini et al. 2008 P