PLATO Spec, the new instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory is now ready for exoplanet research

Twenty years after its decommissioning, the ESO 1.52-m telescope hosted at our La Silla Observatory in Chile, has been given new life. Its brand-new PLATO Spec instrument, a high-resolution spectrograph developed by a consortium led by the Czech Academy of Sciences, has now seen first light. The 50-year-old telescope was refurbished in 2022 and, with this new instrument, it’s now ready to make new cutting-edge astronomical discoveries.

PLATO Spec, which will conduct observations in visible light, has been designed to screen stars with potential exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. The instrument will help find the most promising stars hosting exoplanet candidates by detecting changes in the host star’s light, as it wobbles due to the planet’s gravitational pull. It is so precise that it will be able to detect changes on a star’s velocity down to just 3 m/s, which is equivalent to a person running at modest speed.

The project was developed by the PLATO Spec Consortium, which includes the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (responsible for the telescope modernisation and front end), the German Thuringian State Observatory Tautenburg (calibration unit), the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (spectrograph), the Chilean Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (data processing and pipeline), as well as other strategic partners. As part of this project, the ESO 1.52-m telescope, which had not been in use since 2003, has been modernised with a top-of-the-line instrument that can be operated remotely.

The spectrograph will assist space-based observatories in their search for exoplanets, including the European Space Agency’s current PLATO and future ARIEL missions. PLATO Spec will be able to confirm their potential detections of exoplanets the size of Jupiter to Neptune and study their atmospheres. Its observations will also help better understand the physics and movement of stars, in particular to measure the activity level of a star and how it changes over time.

The consortium will be responsible for 90% of the telescope’s time, with 10% of observations allocated to Chile-based astronomers. After a proprietary period, all data will be made available to the scientific community through the ESO Science archive.

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The project is partially funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID). 

Courtesy of European Southern Observatory