UA Science

You are here

Chad Bender (left), working on NEID (center), Thomas Beatty (right)

Dr. Chad Bender and Dr. Thomas Beatty and the NEID Team See First Light With the Star 51 Peg

The new NEID instrument, now installed at the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Southern Arizona, has made its first observations (you can see the first-object spectrum of 51 Peg HERE) . The NSF-NASA funded instrument is designed to measure the motion of nearby stars with extreme precision — roughly three times better than the previous generation of state-of-the-art instruments — allowing us to detect, determine the mass of, and characterize exoplanets as small as Earth. Steward's Dr Chad Bender is the Instrument Scientist and Dr Thomas Beatty is on the Science Team.

Perched atop Tohono O'odham Nation land in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert, exoplanet-hunting spectrograph NEID is now embarking on discovering planets orbiting stars other than our sun with a similar mass to Earth's. The announcement of first light was made at a press conference held Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

The new instrument, an extreme precision radial velocity spectrometer, is collecting starlight on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a program of the NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NSF’s OIR Lab). NEID takes its name from the Tohono O'odham word meaning "to see." NEID is also a nested acronym for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy. The Name NEID was selected after consultation with the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Researchers at the University of Arizona are leading the commissioning of the instrument, which includes the delivery, installation, integration into the observatory, taking test data, and demonstrating that it meets the requirements. UArizona also serves as the hub for NEID's software pipeline, which translates subtle shifts in the spectrum of starlight into data that tell astronomers about any planets orbiting that star that would be impossible to observe directly.

NEID detects exoplanets by measuring the subtle effect these planets have on their parent stars. Planets tug gravitationally on the star they orbit, producing a small “wobble” — a periodic shift in the velocity of the star.

Thomas Beatty, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory and a member of the NEID science team, uses an analogy to illustrate this balancing game: "When I'm holding hands with my two-year-old while she dances around me, I barely move back and forth because her mass is much smaller than mine. But if two toddlers dance the ring-around-the-rosy, they will move a lot."

The same holds true for celestial bodies like stars and their planets, including in our own solar system: Jupiter causes the sun to move at roughly 29 miles per hour, whereas the Earth causes a sedate movement with a speed of only about 0.2 miles per hour. The size of the wobble is proportional to an orbiting planet’s mass, meaning NEID measurements can be used to determine the masses of exoplanets.

In a single night, NEID can observe between 50 and 100 stars. Through a complicated optical procedure, the light coming from each star is recorded and split into discrete wavelengths, resulting in what astronomers call a spectrum – a chemical signature of starlight that is unique to each star. If a star has planets, the resulting wobble causes the star to move around relative to Earth. Whenever it moves away or toward the Earth, its light spectrum shows characteristic shifts that are proportional to how fast the star moves.

"This curve repeats steady like a metronome for millions of years," Beatty explains. "We take repeated snapshots of each star over five years, and at the end we can figure out what the period of the metronome is."

But first, the scientists have to translate vast amounts of spectral data into something they can analyze and interpret. This is accomplished through NEID's software hub at Steward Observatory.

"The software pipeline is where the sausage is made," says Chad Bender, NEID's instrument scientist and associate astronomer at Steward, who acts as the project's software lead. "It's a big effort for a ground-based project. We call it a pipeline because essentially, we feed raw data into it and it spits out velocities."

Current instruments can measure speeds as low as just over 2 miles per hour (a slow walking pace), but NEID was built to detect even lower speeds — potentially uncovering Earth-mass exoplanets. NEID is expected to reach 0.6 miles per hour, pushing the envelope to higher precision. To allow NEID to make these measurements requires extreme precision — and an equally extreme instrument. Starlight collected by the WIYN telescope is fed by an optical fiber to a purpose-built thermal enclosure encasing the NEID instrument. To ensure that NEID measurements remain stable over the instrument's five-year lifetime, its optics are held at a fixed temperature that is stable to within a thousandth of a degree.

"Because our spectrograph is quite large and all materials change their size in response to shifts in temperature, even small temperature changes can shift our light spectrum around," Beatty explains. "To prevent that, NEID is stabilized to a milli-Kelvin, making it the most stable spectrograph in the world."

Already an impressive exoplanet-hunting machine, NEID becomes even more powerful in partnership with space observatories, such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.

NEID’s first-light observations targeted the star 51 Pegasi, the first sun-like star found, in 1995, to host an exoplanet. “First light is an important milestone in an instrument’s development,” said Jason Wright, NEID Project Scientist at Penn State University. “It is the first verification that NEID is measuring starlight as expected and is on its way to full functionality.”

NEID’s capabilities are particularly impressive given how quickly the instrument went from the drawing board to first light. “The short development time of NEID is remarkable,” explains Jayadev Rajagopal of NSF’s OIR Lab, the WIYN telescope scientist and head of operations. “The NEID team has delivered a next-generation instrument in just 3 years and 9 months.”

According to Bender, the deluge of planet discoveries by TESS was one of the main drivers behind building the NEID instrument as fast as possible.

"You could say it's raining planets at this point, and we wanted to build a bucket so we can catch as many as possible."  

Exoplanets discovered with NEID will help identify targets for follow-up observations with upcoming facilities like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to detect and characterize the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets. This makes NEID an important part of the ongoing search for other earths and takes us one step closer to determining if there are truly Earth-like planets elsewhere in the Milky Way.

We add two photos of observers in action and of the NEID team. The first photo, HERE, is of Sarah Logsden (WIYN Instrument Scientist for NEID), and Heidi Schweiker (WIYN Operations Coordinator), along with Chad Bender. The second photo, HERE, is of the on-site team after it was shown that the 51 Peg spectrum was of the correct quality.

Note that this is most-all a UArizona press release written by Dan Stolte. Thanks, Dan. This story can be seen HERE. The NSG OIR Lab press release can be seen HERE.

For the public
For Public

Public events include our Monday Night Lecture Series, world-reknowned Astronomy Camp and Mt Lemmon Sky Center.

For Students

A good place to start if you want to become an undergrad major or grad student, or need to find our schedule of classes.

 

For Scientists
For Scientists

Find telescopes and instruments, telescope time applications, staff and mountain contacts, and faculty and staff scientific interests.