![]() So Fischer's team set out to improve CHIRON's capabilities. But while a 1-meter wobble might be caused by an exoplanet just two or three times as massive as Earth, an Earth-like planet might only tug on its star by 10 centimeters per second. By 2011, CHIRON was up and running, and shown to be capable of detecting star wobbles as small of 1 meter per second. The acronym CHIRON stands for the CTIO High Resolution spectrometer.Įxoplanets tug on their stars as they orbit, giving the star a slight wobble that can be detected by astronomers. With funding from the National Science Foundation, they built a spectrometer called CHIRON for the 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile. Debra Fischer and her Yale Exoplanet Group team started looking. ![]() That makes the idea of finding exoplanets in the Alpha Cen system pretty exciting. They’re also our closest stellar neighbors, located just 4.37 light years away.
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