Project 1640 is a high contrast imaging project at

Palomar Observatory The Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in the Palomar Mountains of San Diego County, California, United States. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

. It seeks to image

brown dwarfs Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that have more mass than the biggest gas giant planets, but less than the least massive main-sequence stars. Their mass is approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter ()not big enough to sustain nuclear fu ...

and Jupiter-sized planets around nearby stars. Rebecca Oppenheimer, associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconn ...

, is the principal investigator for the project.

Instruments

The two main instruments behind Project 1640 is an Integral field spectrograph (IFS) and an Apodized-pupil Lyot

coronagraph A coronagraph is a telescopic attachment designed to block out the direct light from a star or other bright object so that nearby objects – which otherwise would be hidden in the object's bright glare – can be resolved. Most coronagr ...

at the

Hale Telescope The Hale Telescope is a , 3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, US, named after astronomer George Ellery Hale. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, he orchestrated the planning, de ...

at Palomar. This instrument is the basis of a high-contrast imaging long-term observational program. The instrument uses the chromatic nature of the speckle noise to distinguish it from any true astrophysical companions, including software which increases sensitivity by 10-20 times. Such sensitivity can detect planets of several

Jupiter masses The Jupiter mass, also called Jovian mass, is the unit of mass equal to the total mass of the planet Jupiter. This value may refer to the mass of the planet alone, or the mass of the entire Jovian system to include the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter i ...

. The spectrograph obtains 23 images across the J and H bands (1.06-1.78 μm), with a

spectral resolution The spectral resolution of a spectrograph, or, more generally, of a frequency spectrum, is a measure of its ability to resolve features in the electromagnetic spectrum. It is usually denoted by \Delta\lambda, and is closely related to the resolvi ...

of 45. In approximately 2013, a Post-coronagraph Wave Front Calibration System was added. Its goal is to achieve a wave front irregularity of less than 10 nm.

Preliminary results

On March 10, 2013, Project 1640 made its first remote imaging of another solar system. It imaged four red

exoplanet An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first det ...

s orbiting the star HR8799, 128 light years away from Earth, determining the spectra for all four. One significant result was the detection of a chemical abnormality. At normal temperatures, such as those surrounding the four exoplanets,

ammonia Ammonia is an inorganic chemical compound of nitrogen and hydrogen with the chemical formula, formula . A Binary compounds of hydrogen, stable binary hydride and the simplest pnictogen hydride, ammonia is a colourless gas with a distinctive pu ...

and

methane Methane ( , ) is a chemical compound with the chemical formula (one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). It is a group-14 hydride, the simplest alkane, and the main constituent of natural gas. The abundance of methane on Earth makes ...

should both be present in significant amounts. However, the exoplanets have either

in abundance, while the other chemical is missing. Other chemicals such as

acetylene Acetylene (Chemical nomenclature, systematic name: ethyne) is a chemical compound with the formula and structure . It is a hydrocarbon and the simplest alkyne. This colorless gas is widely used as a fuel and a chemical building block. It is u ...

(not previously detected on any exoplanet) may also be present. There is also a significant cloud cover on the planets.

References

{{Exoplanet search projects Astronomical imaging Exoplanet search projects Infrared spectroscopy Palomar Observatory