This past week the HPF instrument team has been working on the detector hardware. Over the past few years the bias/pedestal level has been slowly rising and recent exceeded 40k counts (of a total 65k available to the A/D converter). This high pedestal had begun impacting our ability to observe bright targets without saturation. The graph below shows the gradual rise of this pedestal level since 2019, and the rapid drop achieved this week during the detector maintenance. While the underlying cause of the pedestal rise is unknown, we anticipate that HPF will return to normal science observations in the coming days.

hbias_20211108

See the HPF team’s blog for a nice description of a new paper using HPF data to observe relatively young planets around a star named V1298 Tau from observations taken in October 2020:

https://hpf.psu.edu/2021/08/13/a-search-for-helium-in-v1298tau/

The Habitable zone Planet Finder continues advancing the field of exoplanets! See below for a round-up of recent updates:

Astronomers Disprove Planet Orbiting Nearby Barnard’s Star

https://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/20210518

A very stealthy alias: the impostor planet of Barnard’s star

https://hpf.psu.edu/2021/05/06/wavelength-dependent-behavior-of-the-hpf-fabry-perot/

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!

Check out the latest results from the HET! There was a press release about this fascinating discovery:

https://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/20200804

For those who want the technical information, see the accepted article on the pre-print server:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.12766

The HPF Team’s blog has a new post describing how they are characterizing an exoplanet’s atmospheric chemistry! It’s very cool stuff, available here:

Measuring Exoplanet Atmospheres with HPF