Calibrating astronomical spectrographs to discover Earth-like planets

该项目旨在开发一种强大的、超精密的校准系统，将多普勒光谱仪的精度提高10倍-足以发现岩石行星。系外行星研究的圣杯是在类太阳恒星的宜居带发现了一颗类似地球的行星。这颗行星对其主星的拖拽导致了恒星光谱的周期性多普勒频移，这是精密天文光谱仪记录的。探测岩石行星的微小漂移需要比最好的光谱仪提供的更高的精度。该项目预计将有助于发现地球双胞胎，即太阳系外的宜居世界。

This project aims to develop a robust, ultra-precise calibration system that improves the precision of Doppler spectrographs by a factor of ten –sufficient to discover rocky planets. The holy grail of exoplanet research is the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. The planet’s tug on its host star causes a periodic Doppler shift of the star’s spectrum which precision astronomical spectrographs record. Detecting minute shifts from rocky planets needs better precision than the best spectrographs provide. This project expects to help to discover Earth twins, habitable worlds outside the Solar system.