First Exoplanet Discovery with SPHERE

(University of Geneva, July 06, 2017)

Most exoplanets are discovered by detecting attenuations of starlight (transit method) or via the gravitational forces acting on its host star (radial velocity method). Thus, most known exoplanets have never actually been seen. To take pictures of planets outside our solar system, very sensitive telescopes have been built in recent years. For more precise imaging, a deformable mirror – SPHERE - was developed by twelve European institutes, including the Observatory of the University of Geneva. The mirror, mounted at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, has now for the first time discovered a planet. SPHERE corrects the terrestrial atmospheric turbulences, occults the light of the star, and is able to detect the signal of a planet a million times lower than the one of its host star.