Exoplanet Tracker | Team ET | Background | The Instrument | Results | All-Sky Survey
Multi-Object Capability
At the University of Florida, we are developing a next generation multiple object Doppler radial velocity instrument. We intend to use several of these instruments at existing wide field telescopes such as Sloan and WIYN telescopes for an all sky survey for extrasolar planets. This new instrument will allow us to measure thousands of stars each night instead of tens of stars with current cross-dispersed echelle spectrographs. Over the next ten to fifteen years, we plan to search millions of stars in the solar neighborhood and we expect to discover hundreds of thousands of planetary systems. Among these, we expect to find thousands of planetary systems similar to our own, that may host life.
A multiple object radial velocity interferometric instrument is currently being developed for the Sloan wide field telescope. The prototype will capable of simultaneously monitoring ~ 25 stars for planets. Future versions will be able to monitor ~100 stars simultaneously.
See our Results page for the first light image from our prototype multi-object instrument!