Category Archives: HPF Science

A Search for Planetary Helium Absorption in the V1298 Tau System

Introduction Understanding how planets form and evolve is one of the fundamental topics of research in exoplanet science. How do planets and their atmospheres form? What are their atmospheres composed of, and how do they evolve with time? The current … Continue reading

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Scrambling the pupil of the Hobby Eberly Telescope

Detection of small Earth like planets in the habitable-zones (HZ) of M dwarfs requires precise radial velocity measurements (RV) at the meter-per-second level. These extremely precise measurements are really hard! As the schematic below illustrates, they necessitate each step in … Continue reading

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A very stealthy alias: the impostor planet of Barnard’s star

Introduction One of the signature targets of HPF’s search for nearby exoplanets is Barnard’s star, the second-closest star system to our own Solar system.  Barnard’s star made the news in late 2018, when the CARMENES team announced the discovery of … Continue reading

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