Project 1640
astronomical imaging project at Palomar Observatory
Project 1640 is a high contrast imaging project at Palomar Observatory. It seeks to image brown dwarfs and Jupiter-sized planets around nearby stars. Rebecca Oppenheimer, associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, 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 at the Hale Telescope 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 spectrograph obtains 23 images across the J and H bands (1.06-1.78 μm), with a spectral resolution 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Project 1640” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.