Hazy skies overhead and HPF discovers the first warm Jupiter around an M dwarf

In the past couple weeks we’ve noticed significant (30-60%) reductions in the amount of starlight reaching the telescope, due to the smoke overhead:

https://hwp-viz.gsd.esrl.noaa.gov/smoke/index.html

It makes the sunsets eerie and washes out the Milky Way at night, too. Hopefully this situation will improve soon! The extinction seems worst at the blue wavelengths (like those that VIRUS uses) and is not bad for redder light (HPF observations are mostly unaffected).

 

 

On the brighter side, yet another HPF paper has been accepted and published – this one is the discovery and confirmation of the first transiting ‘warm’ Jupiter around an M dwarf. You can read the HPF team’s blog post about it:

https://hpf.psu.edu/2020/09/15/toi-1899/

The PSU press release:

https://science.psu.edu/news/Mahadevan9-2020

And of course the published article itself:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07098

 

Hot Jupiters are rare around M dwarfs, and transiting warm Jupiters rarer still. The TESS spacecraft only detected a single transit – and it was only with HPF that we could nail down the orbital period and mass. This one definitely highlights the power of the HET and queue! Congrats to the whole team!

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