After four months of hard work by engineers and scientists from France, Canada, Switzerland and Taiwan, and over a decade in the making, an important milestone has been reached for SPIRou, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT)’s new planet-hunting spectropolarimeter. On April 24 around 7:50 pm Hawaii time, the instrument recorded, for the first time, light coming from a star. During the following few nights, SPIRou gathered an impressive collection of about 440 spectra of 24 stars, demonstrating several of its unique capabilities in the process.
Portion of a SPIRou frame recorded for AD Leo, an active red dwarf located 16 light years away from us. Each group of three vertical bars corresponds to one spectral order, covering a small region of the overall spectral domain. The two left-most vertical bars of each order contain the spectrum of AD Leo (in two orthogonal polarization states) whereas the right-most one contains a Fabry-Perot spectrum (© SPIRou Team).
Artist’s view of an active red dwarf similar to AD Leo, known for its huge flares (© Casey Reed/NASA). AD Leo was the first star observed with CFHT’s new instrument SPIRou.
An upcoming large program, the SPIRou Legacy Survey Planet Search, will exploit SPIRou to closely observe the closest red dwarfs looking for evidence of nearby planetary systems. “SPIRou is a unique and powerful instrument,” says René Doyon, project co-PI and director of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM) and professor at Université de Montréal. “At the Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx), we are all very excited about the fact that it will soon start to find the closest habitable worlds from the Earth, the ones we will be able to study in more detail with the James Webb Space Telescope.”
SPIRou uses a technique known as “velocimetry“, radial velocity measurements coupled with polarimetry in the infrared, to detect the tiny wiggle in a star indicating the presence of planets at very precise levels. “We anticipate the astronomy community will use SPIRou extensively in the upcoming decade,” says Donati. “SPIRou will play a key role in the coordinated exoplanet surveys to come involving multiple space-based missions like the recently launched TESS, and the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in 2020, and the European PLATO mission, planned for 2026.”
SPIRou’s first weeks in Hawaii
Before being packed, shipped and reassembled at CFHT in early 2018, SPIRou was integrated and intensively tested at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie at (IRAP)/Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées (OMP) (CNRS/INSU, UPS, Toulouse, France) in 2017. After being delivered at CFHT in January, SPIRou was installed at its new home location on the third floor of CFHT, and reassembled by engineers and specialists from IRAP / OMP (Toulouse, France), Observatoire de Haute Provence (St Michel, France), National Research Council Herzberg (Victoria, Canada), Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and Université de Montréal (Montreal, Canada), with invaluable support from the whole CFHT team.
Most of the team of engineers from France, Canada, and CFHT, after closing up the SPIRou cryostat (behind them) for the first time in the CFHT coude room.
Small portion of the SPIRou spectrum of the active red dwarf AD Leo as observed (w/ telluric lines, red) and once the telluric spectrum (green) is removed (blue). This illustrates how critical telluric subtraction is to properly identify which lines can give us some information about the observed star and the planets potentially orbiting it (©J.-F. Donati).
After commissioning, SPIRou will start observations for the various projects it was designed for and constructed to accomplish. “A lot of work is still ahead for SPIRou, but we are encouraged by the results of the first commissioning run”, says CFHT’s director of science Daniel Devost. “A sincere congratulations to the entire SPIRou team for the work they have put into this outstanding instrument.”
More information
SPIRou was designed, funded and constructed thanks to a worldwide consortium of institutes, namely IRAP/OMP/UPS, IPAG/OG/UJF, LAM/OHP/Pythéas/UAM, IAP/OP, CNRS/INSU in France, NRC-H and Université de Montréal in Canada, ASIAA in Taiwan, OG in Switzerland, LNA in Brazil, CAUP in Portugal and of course CFHT.
Source and additional information
Media contacts
Mary Beth Laychak
Outreach manager
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
mary@cfht.hawaii.edu
Marie-Eve Naud
Institute for research on exoplanets iREx
Université de Montréal 514-343-6111, ext. 7077
irex@astro.umontreal.ca
Science contacts
Jean-François Donati
IRAP, Toulouse, France
jean-francois.donati@irap.omp.edu
René Doyon
Université de Montréal
doyon@ASTRO.UMontreal.CA
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