The SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) project aims to detect temperate terrestrial planets transiting nearby ultracool dwarfs, including late M-dwarf stars and brown dwarfs, which are well-suited for atmospheric characterization using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and upcoming giant telescopes like the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Led by the University of Liège, SPECULOOS is conducted in partnership with the University of Cambridge, the University of Birmingham, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Bern, and ETH Zurich. The project operates a network of robotic telescopes at two main observatories: SPECULOOS-South in Chile, with four telescopes, and SPECULOOS-North in Tenerife, currently with one telescope (soon to be two). This network is complemented by the SAINT-EX telescope located in San Pedro Mártir, Mexico. In this paper, we review the status of our facilities after five years of operations, the current challenges and development plans, and our latest scientific results.
The OWL@OUKA is the Optical Wide-field patroL (OWL) facility designed and built by Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) and installed in 2015 at Oukaimeden Observatory. For the first time we used the opportunities offered by this instrument for the detection and monitoring the exoplanets by the transit method. In this work, we present, first, the validation of the OWL@OUKA for the transit method by reporting the observations we have done to calibrate the instrument in order to chose the best exposure time for a given star. We report on the results obtained form the first observations, in V filter, of a known transit event of the planet Qatar-1b, a hot Jupiter orbiting a metal-rich K dwarf star (Teff = 5013.0, Vmag = 12.84). We have used the software AstroImagJ to reduce the data and the software EXOFASTv2 to fit the transit and extract the planetary parameters, where we obtained a transit depth 0.0207+0.0044-0.0040 and a planetary radius of 1.09 ± 0.11 RJ , that are in good consistence with the discovery paper. Given the good results obtained, we moved to the second stage of our program, which consists of tracking TESS candidates.
We present here SPECULOOS, a new exoplanet transit search based on a network of 1m-class robotic telescopes targeting the ~1200 ultracool (spectral type M7 and later) dwarfs bright enough in the infrared (K-mag ≤ 12.5) to possibly enable the atmospheric characterization of temperate terrestrial planets with next-generation facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope. The ultimate goals of the project are to reveal the frequency of temperate terrestrial planets around the lowest-mass stars and brown dwarfs, to probe the diversity of their bulk compositions, atmospheres and surface conditions, and to assess their potential habitability.
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