Collaborative Research: An Ultrastable Blue Astro Comb for Exoplanet and Cosmology Research

合作研究：用于系外行星和宇宙学研究的超稳定蓝色 Astro 梳

• 批准号: 0905214
• 负责人: Ronald Walsworth
• 金额: $ 33万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-15 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0905214&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Ultrastable; Blue; Astro

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Great progress has been made in recent years in detecting massive planets orbiting other stars. These exciting discoveries are an important step toward understanding the evolution of other solar systems and whether or not they may harbor life. Tantalizing as these discoveries are, however, they are not conclusive. Astronomers have yet to find a planet in another solar system that could support life as we know it. To do so would require finding smaller solid (not gaseous) earth-like planets orbiting a star within the "habitable zone" where the distance of the planet from the star is such that the surface temperature of the planet can sustain liquid water. There are at least four ways to detect a planet orbiting a star. By far the most successful means to date has been to very carefully monitor the velocity of the star. If the velocity tends to vary regularly about its average value, then it is possible that some celestial body is in orbit around it and we are measuring the reflex velocity of the star due to the changes in the position of the planet in its orbit. This is a very exacting measurement to make and it relies on extremely accurate velocity measurements made with a spectrograph. Large planets create the biggest velocity wiggle and are therefore easiest to detect. But detecting smaller earth like planets in the habitable zone requires much higher precision than is currently available. Dr. Franz Kaertner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is designing a very stable and accurate calibration mechanism to improve the radial velocity measurements. He is working with a number of scientific colleagues and several students to design and build the device over the next two years. This new scheme uses a very rapidly pulsed laser to imprint a regularly spaced calibration "comb" of lines of precisely known wavelengths through the spectrograph and onto the spectrum of the star. This new technique will improve the velocity determination from the current standard by about a factor of 100, enough to detect earth-like planets in the habitable zone.

该奖项是根据2009年的《美国回收与再投资法》（美国法律111-5）资助的。近年来，在发现绕其他恒星的大型行星中取得了进步。 这些令人兴奋的发现是理解其他太阳系演变以及它们是否可以掩盖生命的重要一步。但是，这些发现是诱人的，但是它们并不是结论性。 天文学家尚未在另一个太阳系中找到一个可以支持我们所知道的生活的行星。 为此，需要找到较小的固体（不是气体）地球状的行星，在“宜居区”中绕着星星绕着恒星绕着恒星绕着恒星的距离，从而使行星的表面温度可以维持液态水。至少有四种方法可以检测绕星星的行星。 到目前为止，迄今为止最成功的手段是非常仔细监视恒星的速度。 如果速度倾向于定期变化其平均值，那么某些天体可能在其周围的轨道上，并且由于行星在其轨道上的位置的变化，我们正在测量恒星的反射速度。 这是一个非常严格的测量值，它依赖于使用光谱仪进行的极为准确的速度测量值。 大行星会产生最大的速度摆动，因此最容易检测到。 但是，在宜居区中检测较小的地球所需要的精度要比目前可用的要高得多。 马萨诸塞州理工学院的弗朗兹·卡特纳（Franz Kaertner）博士正在设计一种非常稳定，准确的校准机制，以改善径向速度测量值。 他正在与许多科学同事和几位学生合作，在接下来的两年中设计和制造该设备。该新方案使用非常快速的脉冲激光器来烙印通过光谱仪和恒星光谱上的精确波长线的定期校准“梳子”。 这项新技术将使当前标准的速度确定提高约100倍，足以检测到可居住区域中的类似地球行星。