Portugal news – A Portuguese solar telescope will help find Exo-Earths by overcoming solar noise, according to the Portuguese Institute of astrophysics and space sciences (IA).
A groundbreaking solar telescope developed by the Portuguese Astrophysics Centre of the University of Porto (CAUP), named the Paranal solar Espresso Telescope (PoET), will be installed at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and is expected to be operational in 2025.
The innovative Portuguese telescope will help to find Exo-Earths by tackling the problem of stellar noise from a new angle that will make it possible to overcome the challenges of stellar activity. Solar noise, that is caused by radiation from the Sun due to its high temperature, greatly limits the search and characterization of other Earths in the Universe.
This is why the Portuguese Astrophysics Centre developed the groundbreaking FIERCE (FInding Exo-eaRths) project that is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and involves the development and installation of the Paranal solar Espresso Telescope that will be operated remotely.
The pioneering Portuguese telescope will advance comparative planetology beyond the Solar System to identify exoplanets orbiting other stars that are potentially habitable. Currently, of the nearly 5,000 known planets, as few as 5% are potentially Earth-like in terms of mass and orbital distance.
The Paranal solar Espresso Telescope (PoET) is being entirely developed in Portugal, both at hardware and software levels, and will be scientifically led by the Portuguese Institute of astrophysics and space sciences (IA). This is an important milestone that will allow us to observe the Sun and inject its light into the ESPRESSO 3 spectrograph of European Southern Observatory (ESO) that has already been partially developed by the Portuguese Institute of astrophysics (IA).
The Portuguese telescope will soon be able to give us access to unique data about the star at the center of the Solar System which no other telescope in the world can obtain.
The results of the FIERCE project will be essential for the success of future instruments and space missions with strong Portuguese involvement, that aim to detect and characterize other Earths such as ESA's PLATO and ARIEL space missions, scheduled to launch in 2026 and 2029 respectively, and the ANDES spectrograph, scheduled to come into operation in the early 2030s, when it is installed on ESO’s largest next-generation telescope, the ELT.
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