9 April 2026 – The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET), installed at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument to study the Sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the Sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the Solar System.
“One of the greatest challenges for the detection of other Earths orbiting other Suns is the astrophysical ‘noise’ coming from the host stars,” explains Nuno Santos, the Principal Investigator for PoET, based at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço [IA])) and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal. “PoET observations could be key to the discovery and characterisation of exoplanets, which may currently be hidden in the noise.” – Read the full story on:
