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The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory Begins Its Hunt for Rocky Planets

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The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory Begins Its Hunt for Rocky Planets Telescopes and Instrumentation DOI: 10.18727/0722-6691/5105 The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory Begins its Hunt for Rocky Planets Emmanuël Jehin1 The SPECULOOS Southern Observa- Jupiter, effective temperatures lower than Michaël Gillon 2,1 tory (SSO), a new facility of four 1- 2700 K, and luminosities less than one Didier Queloz3, 4 metre robotic telescopes, began scien- thousandth that of the Sun. Laetitia Delrez 3 tific operations at Cerro Paranal on Artem Burdanov1 1 January 2019. The main goal of the The habitable zones in these systems Catriona Murray 3 SPECULOOS project is to explore are very close to the host stars, corre- Sandrine Sohy1 approximately 1000 of the smallest sponding to orbital periods of only a few 1 Elsa Ducrot (≤ 0.15 R⊙), brightest (Kmag ≤ 12.5), and days. This proximity to the host star Daniel Sebastian1 nearest (d ≤ 40 pc) very low mass stars maximises the transit probability and the Samantha Thompson 3 and brown dwarfs. It aims to discover likelihood of detecting habitable planets. James McCormac 5 transiting temperate terrestrial planets In addition, an Earth-sized planet transit- Yaseen Almleaky 6 well-suited for detailed atmospheric ing a small UCD star produces a 1% Adam J. Burgasser 7 characterisation with future giant tele- transit signal, 100 times deeper than that Brice-Olivier Demory 8 scopes like ESO’s Extremely Large of an equivalent transit around a Sun-like Julien de Wit 9 Telescope (ELT) and the NASA James star, and well within the reach of ground- Khalid Barkaoui 2,1 Webb Telescope (JWST). The SSO is based telescopes. With these properties, Francisco J. Pozuelos1 the core facility of SPECULOOS. The it is possible to characterise the atmos- Amaury H. M. J. Triaud 10 exquisite astronomical conditions at pheres of UCD habitable zone planets — Valérie Van Grootel 1 Cerro Paranal will enable SPECULOOS including the potential detection of spec- to detect exoplanets as small as Mars. troscopic biosignatures — with forth- Here, we briefly describe SPECULOOS, coming giant telescopes such as ESO’s 1 STAR Institute, University of Liège, and present the features and perfor- ELT (Rodler & López-Morales, 2014) and Belgium mance of the SSO facility. the JWST (Kaltenegger & Traub, 2009). 2 Astrobiology Research Unit, University of Liège, Belgium SPECULOOS1, b (Principal Investigator: 3 Cavendish Laboratory, University of Search for Planets EClipsing Michaël Gillon) is a new photometric sur- Cambridge, UK ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS) vey based on a network of 1-metre-class 4 University of Geneva, Switzerland robotic telescopes. It aims to seize the 5 Department of Physics, University of One of the most thrilling questions posed opportunity to detect temperate terres- Warwick, UK by humankind is whether inhabited trial planets transiting nearby UCDs that 6 Space and Astronomy Department, worlds similar to Earth exist elsewhere in are bright enough in the near-infrared King Abdul Aziz University, Saudi the Universe. The most direct way of to make possible the atmospheric char- Arabia answering this question is through the acterisation of their planets in the near 7 Center for Astrophysics and Space detection and detailed atmospheric char- future (see Gillon et al., 2018; Delrez et Science, University of California acterisation of terrestrial exoplanets al., 2018a; Burdanov et al., 2017). San Diego, USA orbiting in the habitable zones of nearby 8 Center for Space and Habitability, stars. The nearest ultra-cool dwarf (UCD) University of Bern, Switzerland stars represent a unique opportunity 9 Department of Earth, Atmospheric and to reach this goal within the next couple Planetary Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, of decades. UCD stars are very low USA mass stars at the bottom of the main Figure 1. The four 1-metre telescopes Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (from right to left)a of 10 School of Physics and Astronomy, sequence, with masses approximately the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory starting the night under Paranal’s sky. University of Birmingham, UK 10% that of the Sun, sizes similar to Peter Aniol Peter 2 The Messenger 174 – December 2018 80 ¦ 60 ¦ 40 ¦ 20 ¦ 0 ¦ 0.15 GG G GG G G G G G G ¦ 0.14 l¦ l¦ 0.13 l¦ l¦ 0.12 ) l¦ ๬ R ( 0.11 Figure 2. Left: The distribution of the SPECULOOS target sample in brightness and estimated radius. Radius Right: The locations of these targets in equatorial 0.10 coordinates, with the Galactic and ecliptic planes indicated as dashed and dotted lines, respectively. 0.09 In both panels, TRAPPIST-1 is shown as a red star. 0.08 observations also enable the robust detection of short-duration transits (as lit- 0.07 tle as 15 minutes) expected for planets 8 910 11 12 0100 around UCDs with very short orbital peri- K mag ods (≤ 1 day). The target sample and observing Because of their low temperatures, UCDs To observe 1000 UCDs with SPECULOOS strategy are faint in the optical, and their spectral over the monitoring periods described energy distributions peak at near- and above requires a total of ~ 20 000 nights The SPECULOOS target sample includes mid-infrared wavelengths. Our signal-to- of survey data. This can be achieved in all UCD stars within 40 pc of the Sun noise analysis demonstrated that 1-metre- ~ 10 years with a network of two facilities, that have a K-band magnitude less than class telescopes on a dry site with good one in each hemisphere and compris - 12.5 and an estimated radius less than seeing, equipped with near-infrared ing four telescopes each, assuming a 15% of the Sun’s. These limits in K-band optimised CCD cameras (providing high global efficiency of 70% (i.e., a 30% time- and radius correspond to the properties quantum efficiencies out to 1 µm) would loss due to bad weather and technical that allow the atmospheric characterisa- be sufficient to achieve the required pho- problems). tion of temperate Earth-sized planets with tometric precision (< 0.1%). We validated JWST. Cross-matching the catalogues this strategy through a six-year prototype These considerations drive the instru- from the second data release (DR2) from survey that we performed with the south- mental conceptual design of our survey: the ESA Gaia mission with the Two ern 0.6-metre telescope of the TRAnsit- a network of ground-based 1-metre-class Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), we iden- ing Planets and PlanetesImals Small Tele- optical telescopes equipped with near- tified about 1000 targets across the sky, scope (TRAPPIST) at ESO’s La Silla infrared optimised CCD cameras, moni- of which ~ 90% are very late M-dwarfs observatory (Jehin et al., 2011; Gillon et toring each UCD individually and continu- and ~ 10% are L-dwarfs. al., 2011). This led to the spectacular dis- ously for a duration long enough to covery of the TRAPPIST-1 2 exoplanetary efficiently and thoroughly probe its habit- Our targets are evenly distributed over system (Gillon et al., 2016, 2017). able zone for transiting planets. Whilst the sky (Figure 2), which means that they we are still in the process of deploying have to be monitored individually. Fortu- In addition to high photometric precision, two telescopes in the northern hemi- nately, the short orbital periods of observations of each target must sphere, our core facility, the SPECULOOS planets in the habitable zones of UCDs be taken nearly continuously over Southern Observatory (SSO), is now (~ 1 week) translate into a required photo- 10–25 nights to assure the detection of fully operational at Paranal. After a two- metric monitoring period for each star low-amplitude transits from planets orbit- year development phase and two years that is much shorter than the equivalent ing in UCD habitable zones. These con- of installation and commissioning, the monitoring period for an Earth-Sun twin tinuous observations not only maximise facility is now starting routine operations. (~ 1 year). Consequently, SPECULOOS the photon counts but also minimise should complete its extensive transit systematics and improve photometric search for planets around 1000 UCD tar- reliability by allowing us to keep all of The SSO site gets within a 10-year window. the stars in a particular field of view on the same pixels of the detector over With its low humidity (80% of nights the course of an entire night. Continuous with < 4 mm precipitable water vapour), The Messenger 174 – December 2018 3 Telescopes and Instrumentation Jehin E. et al., SPECULOOS Begins its Hunt for Rocky Planets Peter Aniol Peter excellent seeing, photometric conditions This design provides high wind resist- Figure 3. The SSO is visible to the left. It neighbours (78% of nights are photometric), and ance, enabling observations in wind the NGTS facility and is downhill from the VISTA –1 peak. The VLT is to the right on top of Cerro Paranal logistical infrastructure, Paranal was speeds reaching 50 km h . The focusing while the basecamp is in the background, in the recognised early on as the preferred site of each telescope is achieved through shade at the middle of the image. for the installation of the SSO. Following motorised axial movement of the second- discussions with ESO and its Scientific ary mirror to an accuracy of 5 µm. strategy to achieve high photometric pre- Technical Committee (STC), the agree- Each telescope is associated with a cision is to keep our target stars on the ment for the construction of the SSO at robotic equatorial ASTELCO New Tech- same pixels for an entire exposure Paranal was signed by the then Director nology Mount NTM-1000. This mount sequence. This is done using an updated General Tim de Zeeuw on 30 March uses direct-drive torque motors, which version of the DONUTS autoguiding 2015.
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