![]() These instruments had already been enormously successful, having uncovered hundreds of exoplanets, but the scientists wanted to push the technology to find smaller and smaller planets. The idea for KPF first came about in 2014 when astronomers were looking for ways to improve planet-hunting instruments that use the radial velocity method. "It will also be faster, so we can measure planet masses in much less time than it took before. "KPF will be much more precise than our current tools, enabling richer science through better measurements of the masses, orbits, and compositions of the smaller planets," Howard says. KPF will also discover nearby planets that make ideal candidates for future portraits by other telescopes, such as the planned Thirty Meter Telescope, which could take direct images of planets orbiting next to their stars. In addition to discovering new planets, the instrument will determine the compositions of up to thousands of known planets, and answer mysteries about the surprisingly diverse array of planetary systems identified so far. We will continue to tune and refine KPF to detect even fainter wobbles, with the goal of eventually having the sensitivity to detect Earth-mass planets that orbit stars like our sun, the true Earth analogs." "Any Earth-like planets in this zone would be huddled close to their stars like it is a campfire. ![]() "Stars that are cooler than our sun have habitable zones that are located closer to the star," Howard explains. A habitable zone is the region around a star where temperatures are suited for liquid water, a necessary ingredient for life as we know it. It can also detect Earth-mass planets in the habitable zones of smaller, cooler stars, although it cannot yet see them in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. The instrument's state-of-the-art technology means that it can detect planets as small as Earth, and even smaller in some cases. ![]() The less massive the planet, the smaller the wobble that is produced. KPF will detect planets by looking for this stellar wobble in the spectra of stars (a spectrum displays the different frequencies of light from a star). When the stars move back and forth, or wobble, their light is shifted in the same way that the sound of a siren changes in frequency depending on whether the noise is traveling away from or toward you, a so-called Doppler shift. KPF detects planets by looking for the periodic motions of their host stars caused by the planets as they orbit around and gravitationally "tug" on the stars. "We have been awaiting the arrival of KPF for nearly a decade, and we are thrilled to be able to take our already very successful exoplanet discovery program to the next level." "The advent of KPF marks a major and exciting step forward in our ability to advance the quest to eventually find habitable earth-like planets around other stars," says Hilton Lewis, director of Keck Observatory. "I'm excited to use the instrument to study the great diversity of exoplanets and to tease apart the mysteries of how they formed and evolved to their present states." "Seeing KPF's first astronomical spectrum was a moving experience," says Andrew Howard, the KPF principal investigator and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. While KPF will routinely observe stars, the KPF team chose to celebrate KPF's planet-finding capabilities by directly observing Jupiter in our own solar system. ![]() The instrument, which uses the "wobble" or radial velocity method of planet hunting, achieved so-called first light on November 9, 2022, which means it captured its first data from the sky, in this case from the planet Jupiter. Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi is now primed and ready to search for and characterize hundreds, and ultimately, thousands of exoplanets, including the missing, smaller ones. That will soon change as the Caltech-led Keck Planet Finder (KPF) instrument at W. However, the quest for small planets similar to Earth-those most promising in the search for alien life-has been limited due to the miniscule effects that these planets have on their host stars. The planets come in many sizes and compositions and include everything from molten lava worlds to gas giant planets larger than Jupiter. More than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars beyond our sun, have been spotted over the last 30 years, and discoveries from space and ground-based telescopes continue to roll in. Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships ![]()
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