Doppler Spectroscopy - History

History

Otto Struve proposed in 1952 the use of powerful spectrographs to detect distant planets. He described how a very large planet, as large as Jupiter, for example, would cause its parent star to wobble slightly as the two objects orbit around their center of mass. He predicted that the small Doppler shifts to the light emitted by the star, caused by its continuously varying radial velocity, would be detectable by the most sensitive spectrographs as tiny red shifts and blue shifts in the star's emission. However, the technology of the time produced radial velocity measurements with errors of 1,000 m/s or more, making them useless for the detection of orbiting planets. The expected changes in radial velocity are very small – Jupiter causes the Sun to change velocity by about 12.4 m/s over a period of 12 years, and the Earth's effect is only 0.1 m/s over a period of 1 year – so long-term observations by instruments with a very high resolution are required.

Advances in spectrometer technology and observational techniques in the 1980s and 1990s produced instruments capable of detecting the first of many new extrasolar planets. The ELODIE spectrograph, installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory in Southern France in 1993, could measure radial velocity shifts as low as 7 m/s, low enough for an extraterrestrial observer to detect Jupiter's influence on the Sun. Using this instrument, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz identified 51 Pegasi b, a "Hot Jupiter" in the constellation Pegasus. Although planets had previously been detected orbiting pulsars, 51 Pegasi b was the first planet ever found orbiting a main-sequence star, and the first detected using Doppler spectroscopy.

In November of 1995, the scientists published their findings in the journal Nature; the paper has since been cited over 1,000 times. Since that date, over 700 exoplanet candidates have been identified, and most have been detected by Doppler search programs based at the Keck, Lick, and Anglo-Australian Observatories (respectively, the California, Carnegie and Anglo-Australian planet searches), and teams based at the Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search.

Beginning in the early 2000s, a second generation of planet-hunting spectrographs permitted far more precise measurements. The HARPS spectrograph, installed at the La Silla Observatory in Chile in 2003, can identify radial velocity shifts as small as 0.3 m/s, enough to locate many rocky, Earth-like planets. A third generation of spectrographs is expected to come online in 2017. With measurement errors estimated below 0.1 m/s, these new instruments would allow an extraterrestrial observer to detect even Earth.