SPECULOOS Northern Observatory: Searching for Red Worlds in the Northern Skies

Abstract

SPECULOOS is a ground-based transit survey consisting of six identical 1 m robotic telescopes. The immediate goal of the project is to detect temperate terrestrial planets transiting nearby ultracool dwarfs (late M-dwarf stars and brown dwarfs), which could be amenable for atmospheric research with the next generation of telescopes. Here, we report the developments of the northern counterpart of the project—SPECULOOS Northern Observatory, and present its performance during the first three years of operations from mid-2019 to mid-2022. Currently, the observatory consists of one telescope, which is named Artemis. The Artemis telescope demonstrates remarkable photometric precision, allowing it to be ready to detect new transiting terrestrial exoplanets around ultracool dwarfs. Over the period of the first three years after the installation, we observed 96 objects from the SPECULOOS target list for 6000 hr with a typical photometric precision of 0.5%, and reaching a precision of 0.2% for relatively bright non-variable targets with a typical exposure time of 25 s. Our weather downtime (clouds, high wind speed, high humidity, precipitation and/or high concentration of dust particles in the air) over the period of three years was 30% of overall night time. Our actual downtime is 40% because of additional time loss associated with technical problems.

TOI 4201 b and TOI 5344 b: Discovery of Two Transiting Giant Planets around M-dwarf Stars and Revised Parameters for Three Others

“…Two full transits of TOI 3714 were observed using the SPECULOOS-North 1.0 m telescope (Delrez et al 2018;Sebastian et al 2021;Burdanov et al 2022) and an Andor ikon-L imager on the nights of 2022 October 19 and 30. The first transit was observed in g¢, while the second was observed in r. The observations were scheduled following Sebastian et al (2021) and reduced to light curves following Murray et al (2020) and Garcia et al (2021Garcia et al ( , 2022.…”

Zamanlama Yöntemiyle Ötegezegen Keşfi

“…ESO arşivinde ayrıca en son La Palma İspanya'daki teleskobun da devreye girmesi ile 5 adet 1 m'lik teleskopla temel olarak M-tayf türünden cüce yıldızlar etrafında gezegen arayan SPECULOOS taramasının verileri de sağlanmaktadır (Sebastian ve diğ. 2021;Burdanov ve diğ. 2022).…”

Impact of Planetary Parameters on Water Clouds Microphysics

“…Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in recent decades. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, Ricker et al 2010) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, Gardner et al 2006), as well as ground-based surveys including MEarth, TRAPPIST, and SPECULOOS (Gillon et al 2011;Berta et al 2012;Irwin et al 2014;Burdanov et al 2022), have dramatically increased the number of detected exoplanets around M-stars. These planets, however, may not be habitable because of atmospheric loss (Deming et al 2009;Cowan et al 2015;Zahnle & Catling 2017).…”