Lick Observatory's newest telescope, the Automated Planet Finder (APF) has found two new planetary systems in its first several months of operation.
The APF began operation in January on Mt. Hamilton, and has since spent night after night looking for nearby stars in order to find planets the size of Earth, according to Malaysia Sun.
The fully autonomous system checks the weather, decides which stars to observe and moves the telescope to different stars every night, obtaining data that will reveal if planets are present.
The telescope's performance has been successful as the first and only robotic planet-finding technology, redOrbit reported. Many discoveries have been made in the search for planets beyond Earth's solar system, which are referred to as "extrasolar planets" or "exoplanets". NASA's Kepler spacecraft has made the effort more achievable through its findings. However, unlike Kepler, which studied distant stars in a small area in the sky, the APF focuses on stars close by and covers the whole sky.
"The planetary systems we're finding are our nearest neighbors," said Steve Vogt, leader of the APF project and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. "Those are the ones that will matter to future generations."
The facility of the APF features a 2.4-meter telescope and the Levy Spectrometer, which Vogt designed just for hunting planets. The spectrometer takes starlight from the telescope and extends it into a rainbow of colors, which splits the light into a spectrum of thousands of different wavelengths. By measuring the spectrum of the stars, astronomers can find the small wobble in a star caused by an orbiting planet's gravitational tug, the Daily Galaxy reported.
One of the planetary systems (HD 141399) has four gas giant planets, which are similar to the four gas giants in our solar system, with the exception that their orbits are closer to their star. The other system (GJ 687) has a Neptune-mass planet that orbits a red dwarf star. Vogt said these systems were not huge discoveries. However, the APF is capable of finding an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star close by in the habitable zone, where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface, redOrbit reported.
"APF will be a marvelous facility for finding potentially habitable Earth-sized planets around our nearest stellar neighbors," said Paul Butler, longtime collaborator of Vogt of the Carnegie Institute of Washington.
