A Program to Detect and Characterize Extra-Solar Giant Planets

We initiated a significant hardware upgrade to the AFOE, to increase its efficiency for precise radial velocity studies to the level where we can continue to contribute usefully to extrasolar planet research on relatively bright stars. The AFOE, at a 1.5-m telescope, will of course not have the sensitivity of radial velocity instruments at larger telescopes, such as the HIRES on Keck or the Hectochelle on the MMT telescope (about to come on line). However, it has been possible to increase its efficiency for precise radial velocity studies by a factor of 4 to 5, which-combined with the large amount of telescope time available at the 1.5-m telescope-will permit us to do intensive follow-up observations of stars brighter than about 8 magnitude. The AFOE was originally designed primarily for asteroseismology using a ThAr reference. This provided useful wavelength stability over tens of minutes as required for asteroseismology, but we were unable to get a long-term (month-to-month) velocity precision better than about 15 m/s with that setup. Hence, we implemented an iodine cell as a wavelength reference for extrasolar planet studies. However, the optical design of the original AFOE did not completely span the wavelength range covered by the iodine absorption spectrum, and furthermore the optics suffered significant light loss through optical obscuration in the camera secondary. To remedy this, we replaced the AFOE grating with a new one that covered the entire iodine spectral range at somewhat lower spectral resolution, and replaced the camera with a transmitting lens. (The use of a lens was made possible by restricting the spectral range covered by the upgraded AFOE to only the iodine region.) These upgrades were successfully completed, and the instrument was tested for three nights in fall of 2002. The expected improvement in sensitivity by a factor of 4 to 5 was observed: that is, the same velocity precision as previously attained (of order 5 to 7 m/s) was now obtained on a stars that are about 4 to 5 times fainter. Unfortunately, just after installing the new AFOE optics, there was a catastrophic failure of the old Tektronix CCD. A careful investigation was made, and it was determined that the failure was probably due to too many thermal cyclings over the previous 8 years. The only solution was to purchase a new CCD. Internal funds of $16,000 were found for this purpose, and the new CCD (a thinned, back-illuminated Marconi 2K x 2K device with 13.5 micron pixels, and employing dual readout channels to keep the readout time as short as 20 seconds) was ordered, has now arrived, and is currently under test before 1 being installed in the AFOE liquid nitrogen dewar. At the same time, we expect to implement new CCD control electronics. This system should be better in many ways than the previous detector (including eliminating the need for UV flashing to maximize the quantum efficiency). We plan to install the detector on the telescope and begin operations again in April of this year.