Abstract
We describe the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), which is a ground-based project searching for transiting exoplanets orbiting bright stars. NGTS builds on the legacy of previous surveys, most notably WASP, and is designed to achieve higher photometric precision and hence find smaller planets than have previously been detected from the ground. It also operates in red light, maximising sensitivity to late K and early M dwarf stars. The survey specifications call for photometric precision of 0.1 per cent in red light over an instantaneous field of view of 100 square degrees, enabling the detection of Neptune-sized exoplanets around Sun-like stars and super-Earths around M dwarfs. The survey is carried out with a purpose-built facility at Cerro Paranal, Chile, which is the premier site of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). An array of twelve 20cm f/2.8 telescopes fitted with back-illuminated deep-depletion CCD cameras are used to survey fields intensively at intermediate Galactic latitudes. The instrument is also ideally suited to ground-based photometric follow-up of exoplanet candidates from space telescopes such as TESS, Gaia and PLATO. We present observations that combine precise autoguiding and the superb observing conditions at Paranal to provide routine photometric precision of 0.1 per cent in 1 hour for stars with I-band magnitudes brighter than 13. We describe the instrument and data analysis methods as well as the status of the survey, which achieved first light in 2015 and began full survey operations in 2016. NGTS data will be made publicly available through the ESO archive.
Highlights
The photometric detection of transits has proved to be the key to determining a wide range of the physical characteristics of exoplanets
We describe the Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), which is a ground-based project searching for transiting exoplanets orbiting bright stars
We find our survey images are useful in assessing the impact of scattered light from bright stars that can be outside the field of view
Summary
The photometric detection of transits has proved to be the key to determining a wide range of the physical characteristics of exoplanets. WASP and HATNet employ telephoto lenses mounted on CCD cameras to make precise photometric measurements over large swaths of the sky, while HATSouth employs 24 telescope tubes spread over three locations in the southern hemisphere These surveys have found planets around the mass of Saturn to a few times the mass of Jupiter, and with radii between that of Saturn and twice Jupiter (Fig. 1). Space-based surveys, most notably Kepler (Borucki et al 2010) and CoRoT (Auvergne et al 2009), have made more precise photometric measurements and have thereby discovered transiting exoplanets with smaller radii These have included rocky exoplanets (e.g. Leger et al 2009; Queloz et al 2009; Batalha et al 2011), multi-planet systems (e.g. Lissauer et al 2011) and even circumbinary planets (e.g. Doyle et al 2011; Welsh et al 2012). In this paper we describe a new ground-based instrument that has been designed to discover new transiting exoplanets in these size ranges and to follow up candidate exoplanets from space telescopes: the Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)
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