Ronny Errmann

We present the design and testing of a prototype in-plane echelle spectrograph based on an actively controlled fiber-fed double-pass design. This system aims to be small and efficient with the minimum number of optical surfaces—currently a collimator/camera lens, cross-dispersing prism, grating and a reflector to send light to the detector. It is built from catalog optical components and has dimensions of approximately 20 × 30 cm. It works in the optical regime with a resolution of >70,000. The spectrograph is fed by a bifurcated fiber with one fiber to a telescope and the other used to provide simultaneous Thorium Argon light illumination for wavelength calibration. The positions of the arc lines on the detector are processed in real time and commercial auto-guiding software is used to treat the positions of the arc lines as guide stars. The guiding software sends any required adjustments to mechanical piezo-electric actuators which move the mirror sending light to the camera removing any drift in the position of the arc lines. The current configuration using an sCMOS detector provides a precision of 3.5 milli-pixels equivalent to 4 m s⁻¹ in a standard laboratory environment.

We describe a flexible data reduction package for high resolution cross-dispersed echelle data. This open-source package is developed in Python and includes optional GUIs for most of the steps. It does not require any pre-knowledge about the form or position of the echelle-orders. It has been tested on cross-dispersed echelle spectrographs between 13k and 115k resolution (bifurcated fiber-fed spectrogaph ESO-HARPS and single fiber-fed spectrograph TNT-MRES). HiFLEx can be used to determine radial velocities and is designed to use the TERRA package but can also control the radial velocity packages such as CERES and SERVAL to perform the radial velocity analysis. Tests on HARPS data indicates radial velocities results within ±3 m s⁻¹ of the literature pipelines without any fine tuning of extraction parameters.

We will review the development in the last decade of discrete beam combiners (DBC), phase sensors based on the propagation of light in photonic lattices. The latest results on the development of DBC for astronomical applications will be presented, along with a new application for the complete tomography of modes at the tip of a multi-mode fiber. The possible use of the DBC in monitoring and controlling modal instabilities in high power lasers will be discussed.

We present long-term photometric observations of the young open cluster IC 348 with a baseline time-scale of 2.4 yr. Our study was conducted with several telescopes from the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI) network in the Bessel R band to find periodic variability of young stars. We identified 87 stars in IC 348 to be periodically variable; 33 of them were unreported before. Additionally, we detected 61 periodic non-members of which 41 are new discoveries. Our wide field of view was the key to those numerous newly found variable stars. The distribution of rotation periods in IC 348 has always been of special interest. We investigate it further with our newly detected periods but we cannot find a statistically significant bimodality. We also report the detection of a close eclipsing binary in IC 348 composed of a low-mass stellar component (M ≳ 0.09 M_⊙) and a K0 pre-main-sequence star (M ≈ 2.7 M_⊙). Furthermore, we discovered three detached binaries among the background stars in our field of view and confirmed the period of a fourth one.

CVSO 30 is a unique young low-mass system, because, for the first time, a close-in transiting and a wide directly imaged planet candidates are found around a common host star. The inner companion, CVSO 30 b, is the first possible young transiting planet orbiting a previously known weak-lined T Tauri star. With five telescopes of the ‘Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative’ located in Asia, Europe and South America, we monitored CVSO 30 over three years in a total of 144 nights and detected 33 fading events. In two more seasons we carried out follow-up observations with three telescopes. We can confirm that there is a change in the shape of the fading event between different observations and that the fading event even disappears and reappears. A total of 38 fading event light curves were simultaneously modelled. We derived the planetary, stellar and geometrical properties of the system and found them slightly smaller but in agreement with the values from the discovery paper. The period of the fading event was found to be 1.36 s shorter and 100 times more precise than the previous published value. If CVSO 30 b would be a giant planet on a precessing orbit, which we cannot confirm, yet, the precession period may be shorter than previously thought. But if confirmed as a planet it would be the youngest transiting planet ever detected and will provide important constraints on planet formation and migration time-scales.

The vast majority of extrasolar planets are detected by indirect detection methods such as transit monitoring and radial velocity measurements. While these methods are very successful in detecting short-periodic planets, they are mostly blind to wide sub-stellar or even stellar companions on long orbits. In our study, we present high-resolution imaging observations of 60 exoplanet hosts carried out with the lucky imaging instrument AstraLux at the Calar Alto 2.2 m telescope as well as with the new Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) high-resolution adaptive optics imager at the ESO/VLT in the case of a known companion of specific interest. Our goal is to study the influence of stellar multiplicity on the planet formation process. We detected and confirmed four previously unknown stellar companions to the exoplanet hosts HD 197037, HD 217786, Kepler-21 and Kepler-68. In addition, we detected 11 new low-mass stellar companion candidates which must still be confirmed as bound companions. We also provide new astrometric and photometric data points for the recently discovered very close binary systems WASP-76 and HD 2638. Furthermore, we show for the first time that the previously detected stellar companion to the HD 185269 system is a very low mass binary. Finally, we provide precise constraints on additional companions for all observed stars in our sample.

Nulling interferometry has been identified as a competitive technique for the detection of extrasolar planets. In its basic form, the technique consists of combining out-of-phase a single pair of telescopes to effectively null the light of a bright star and reveal the dim glow of the companion. However, in order to mitigate the effect of the stellar leaks through the interferometer, a broad angular central null is required. The hierarchical combination of several pairs of telescopes can accomplish this task. We have manufactured and tested with monochromatic light an integrated optics component, which combines a linear array of four telescopes in the nulling mode envisaged by Angel and Woolf [Astroph. J. 475, 373–379 (1997). [CrossRef] ]. By simulating in the laboratory the motion of a star in the sky, we could measure the expected angular transmission of the four-telescope nuller. Moreover, the tests have demonstrated a broad nulling scaling as the fourth power of the baseline delay.