CHIRON—A Fiber Fed Spectrometer for Precise Radial Velocities

By A. Tokovinin, Debra A. Fischer, M. Bonati, M. Giguere, P. Moore, C. Schwab, J. Spronck, A. Szymkowiak. 2013

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The CHIRON optical high-resolution echelle spectrometer was commissioned at the 1.5 m telescope at CTIO in 2011. The instrument was designed for high throughput and stability, with the goal of monitoring radial velocities of bright stars with high precision and high cadence for the discovery of low-mass exoplanets. Spectral resolution of R = 79 000 is attained when using a slicer with a total (including telescope and detector) efficiency of 6% or higher, while a resolution of R = 136 000 is available for bright stars. A fixed spectral range of 415–880 nm is covered. The echelle grating is housed in a vacuum enclosure and the instrument temperature is stabilized to ± 0.2°. Stable illumination is provided by an octagonal multimode fiber with excellent light-scrambling properties. An iodine cell is used for wavelength calibration. We describe the main optics, fiber feed, detector, exposure-meter, and other aspects of the instrument, as well as the observing procedure and data reduction.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60737cebfd67767ce0291b481b41c0c94db856e5

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Citations in the corpus

RADIAL VELOCITIES OF SOUTHERN VISUAL MULTIPLE STARS (2014, methodology): “The same feeding and calibration system is now used at the CHIRON spectrometer (Tokovinin et al. 2013) that replaced FECH in 2010.”
APF—The Lick Observatory Automated Planet Finder (2014, methodology): “Unlike HARPS, where the entire spectrometer is enclosed in a vacuum chamber, or CHIRON (Tokovinin et al. 2013) and PFS where the echelle is enclosed in a vacuum chamber, no attempt was made with the Levy to control or stabilize atmospheric pressure.”
State of the Field: Extreme Precision Radial Velocities (2016, methodology): “The CHIRON spectrometer (Tokovinin et al. 2013) was commissioned at the SMARTS 1.5-m CTIO telescope59 in 2011 and is still being used for exoplanet searches.”