Issue |
A&A
Volume 678, October 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A114 | |
Number of page(s) | 12 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346619 | |
Published online | 13 October 2023 |
First on-sky results of a Fabry–Perot Instrument for Oxygen Searches (FIOS) prototype
1
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics,
Giessenbachstrasse,
85748
Garching, Germany
e-mail: suri@mpe.mpg.de
2
Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science,
234 Herzl Street,
Rehovot
7610001, Israel
3
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian,
60 Garden Street,
Cambridge, MA
02138, USA
Received:
7
April
2023
Accepted:
24
July
2023
Context. The upcoming Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) are expected to have a sufficient collecting area required to detect potential biosignature gases such as molecular oxygen, O2, in the atmosphere of terrestrial planets around nearby stars.
Aims. One of the most promising detection methods is transmission spectroscopy. To maximize our capability to detect O2 using this method, spectral resolutions R ≥ 300 000 are required to fully resolve the absorption lines in an Earth-like exoplanet atmosphere and disentangle the signal from telluric lines.
Methods. Current high-resolution spectrographs typically achieve a spectral resolution of R ~ 100 000. Increasing the resolution in seeing limited observations and/or instruments requires drastically larger optical components, making these instruments even more expensive and hard to fabricate and assemble. Instead, we demonstrate a new approach to high-resolution spectroscopy. We implemented an ultra-high spectral resolution booster to be coupled to a high-resolution spectrograph. The instrument is based on a chained Fabry-Perot array which generates a hyperfine spectral profile.
Results. We present on-sky telluric observations with a lab demonstrator. Depending on the configuration, this two-arm prototype reaches a resolution of R = 250 000–350 000. After carefully modeling the prototype’s behavior, we propose a Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) design for an eight-arm array configuration aimed at ELTs capable of exceeding R = 300 000.
Conclusions. The novel FPI resolution booster can be plugged in at the front end of an existing R = 100 000 spectrograph to overwrite the spectral profile with a higher resolution for exoplanet atmosphere studies.
Key words: instrumentation: spectrographs / techniques: spectroscopic / techniques: interferometric / planets and satellites: atmospheres / planets and satellites: terrestrial planets
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model.
Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.