NASA has selected a team of researchers from Penn State University to build a $10 million state-of-the-art instrument that will detect and search for exoplanets.
Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. This revolutionary instrument, named NEID, which is short for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy, will search for exoplanets by measuring the minuscule "wobbling" of stars.
Led by Suvrath Mahadevan, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, this highly precise instrument will be completed in 2019 and attached to the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
"We are privileged to have been selected to build this new instrument for the exoplanet community," Mahadevan said. "This is a testament to our multi-institutional and interdisciplinary team of talented graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and senior scientists."
NEID will detect exoplanets by the tiny gravitational tug, or "wobble," they exert on their stars. The wobble indicates there is a planet orbiting the star, while the size of the wobble tells scientists the size of the planet.
While astronomers have been using the wobble effect to study exoplanets for years, NEID is expected to be 10 times more precise than any current methods.
"NEID will be more stable than any existing spectrograph, allowing astronomers around the world to make the precise measurements of the motions of nearby, Sun-like stars," said Jason Wright, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a member of the science advisory team. "Our team will use NEID to discover and measure the orbits of rocky planets at the right distances from their stars to host liquid water on their surfaces."
After the instrument is built, scientists expect it will be able to detect stellar movements as tiny as 0.1 meters per second.
"These are very challenging measurements," added Cullen Blake, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State University. "A larger goal of this work is to identify exoplanets we might want to study further in the coming years and decades. With the next generation of satellites, we might observe something about the atmospheres of these planets that would convince us that there is something beyond just volcanoes and rocks there. There might be something biological going on there, too."
