Stellar Spectroscopy in the Near-infrared with a Laser Frequency Comb
Abstract
The discovery and characterization of exoplanets around nearby stars is driven by profound scientific questions about the uniqueness of Earth and our Solar System, and the conditions under which life could exist elsewhere in our Galaxy. Doppler spectroscopy, or the radial velocity (RV) technique, has been used extensively to identify hundreds of exoplanets, but with notable challenges in detecting terrestrial mass planets orbiting within habitable zones. We describe infrared RV spectroscopy at the 10 m Hobby-Eberly telescope that leverages a 30 GHz electro-optic laser frequency comb with nanophotonic supercontinuum to calibrate the Habitable Zone Planet Finder spectrograph. Demonstrated instrument precision <10 cm/s and stellar RVs approaching 1 m/s open the path to discovery and confirmation of habitable zone planets around M-dwarfs, the most ubiquitous type of stars in our Galaxy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.00500,
title = {Stellar Spectroscopy in the Near-infrared with a Laser Frequency Comb},
author = {Andrew J. Metcalf and Tyler Anderson and Chad F. Bender and Scott Blakeslee and Wesley Brand and David R. Carlson and William D. Cochran and Scott A. Diddams and Michael Endl and Connor Fredrick and Sam Halverson and Dan D. Hickstein and Fred Hearty and Jeff Jennings and Shubham Kanodia and Kyle F. Kaplan and Eric Levi and Emily Lubar and Suvrath Mahadevan and Andrew Monson and Joe P. Ninan and Colin Nitroy and Steve Osterman and Scott B. Papp and Franklyn Quinlan and Larry Ramsey and Paul Robertson and Arpita Roy and Christian Schwab and Steinn Sigurdsson and Kartik Srinivasan and Gudmundur Stefansson and David A. Sterner and Ryan Terrien and Alex Wolszczan and Jason T. Wright and Gabriel Ycas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.00500},
year = {2019}
}