Europe's Newest Exoplanet Hunter

Europe's Newest Exoplanet Hunter Is Built From Five Stock Digital Cameras

MASCARA is cheap, flexible, and only requires off-the-shelf digital cameras.

ESO/G. J. Talens
 
By David Grossman

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has made the first successful observations with its latest exoplanet hunter, the MASCARA (Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA) station in Chile. It is the second MASCARA station in the world, and the first in the southern hemisphere of the planet.

"Stations are needed in both the northern and southern hemisphere to obtain all-sky coverage," said Ignas Snellen, MASCARA project lead from Leiden University, in a press release. "With the second station at La Silla now in place, we can monitor almost all the brighter stars over the entire sky."


Installation of MASCARA planet hunting system at ESO's La Silla Observatory.
ESO/G. Otten and G. J. Talens

Beyond the two-hemisphere coverage, MASCARA is notable for it's compact and economical design. If hunting for exoplanets calls to mind giant satellite dishes and orbiting space telescopes like Kepler, you'll might be disappointed. MASCARA consists of five digital cameras with off-the-shelf components. It takes "repeated measurements of the brightnesses of thousands of stars and uses software to hunt for the slight dimming of a star's light as a planet crosses the face of the star," according to ESO.

MASCARA looks for the brightest stars in the sky that are not being probed by space or ground-based surveys. It can monitor stars roughly ten times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. MASCARA is mainly looking for so-called "hot Jupiters," giant worlds that are physically similar to Jupiter but orbit much closer to their parent stars, resulting in scorching surface temperatures. MASCARA also has the potential to discover super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets.


This image from the system is a mosaic of the images from the five separate cameras. It shows almost all of the sky, including the spectacular band of Milky Way arching overhead.
ESO/G. J. Talens and G. Otten

MASCARA will work with in tandem with other elements of the ESO, most notably its Very Large Telescope (VLT), which recently got an upgrade so it can search for exoplanets as well. We have already found thousands of planets beyond our solar system, and with efficient systems like MASCARA, that number will only continue to grow.