Astro-comb may boost Radial Velocity resolution 100x

Relevant news articles.

· National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080402-planets-comb.html

· Centauri-Dreams blog http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1811

This will greatly boost current Doppler Spectroscopy resolution down to 1 cm², 100 times greater than what is currently used. This is what is needed to start seriously hunting for Earth-like planets. Red dwarf stars, being rather cool, shouldn't have a lot of jitter, so we may expect a lot of terrestrial worlds found around these stars in the future.

The first astro-comb will be installed in 2009 or 2010

Wikipedia wrote:

The first astro-comb will be installed in 2009 or 2010 on the William Herschel Telescope on the Canary Islands

nice work. Not sure if it would work on centauri , being a multiple star , but sure it would ascertain the candidates from the kepler mission.

Alpha Centauri is, of course, one of the first systems that come to mind. I believe that it wouldn't be that hard. Alpha Centauri, being really close, has the advantage in that both of it's stars have a rather large seperation. Proxima is really seperated. If this method is used on Alpha Centauri B, we may be able to find any planets in a shorter time than the 5 years Greg posted on the Systemic blog. Likely, the intrinsic jitter of the star would be the only limiting factor.

Successful prototype demonstration.

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/pr-26-08.html

ESO article wrote:

After successful tests in the MPQ laboratory in 2007, the team have successfully tested a prototype device using the laser comb at the VTT (Vacuum Tower Telescope) solar telescope in Tenerife, on 8 March 2008, measuring the spectrum of the Sun in infrared light. The results are already impressive, and the technique promises to achieve the accuracy needed to study these big astronomical questions.

Laser frequency comb techniques for precise astronomical spectroscopy
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.0819

Quote :

Precise astronomical spectroscopic analyses routinely assume that individual pixels in charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have uniform sensitivity to photons. Intra-pixel sensitivity (IPS) variations may already cause small systematic errors in, for example, studies of extra-solar planets via stellar radial velocities and cosmological variability in fundamental constants via quasar spectroscopy, but future experiments requiring velocity precisions approaching ~1 cm/s will be more strongly affected. Laser frequency combs have been shown to provide highly precise wavelength calibration for astronomical spectrographs, but here we show that they can also be used to measure IPS variations in astronomical CCDs in situ. We successfully tested a laser frequency comb system on the Ultra-High Resolution Facility spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. By modelling the 2-dimensional comb signal recorded in a single CCD exposure, we find that the average IPS deviates by <8 per cent if it is assumed to vary symmetrically about the pixel centre. We also demonstrate that series of comb exposures with absolutely known offsets between them can yield tighter constraints on symmetric IPS variations from ~100 pixels. We discuss measurement of asymmetric IPS variations and absolute wavelength calibration of astronomical spectrographs and CCDs using frequency combs.

http://www.caltech.edu/news/new-calibration-tool-will-help-astronomers-look-habitable-exoplanets-49624

Caltech :

New Calibration Tool Will Help Astronomers Look for Habitable Exoplanets