Weihai Echelle Spectrograph (WES) is the first the fiber-fed echelle spectrograph in China. WES can provide data for the studies of metal abundance of stars, exoplanets researches and asteroseismology, etc. A brief description of its design and performance is given.

The ‘holy grail’ of exoplanet research today is the detection of an earth-like planet: a rocky planet in the habitable zone around a main-sequence star. Extremely precise Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool to find and characterize earth-like planets; however, to find these planets around solar-type stars, we need nearly one order of magnitude better radial velocity (RV) precision than the best current spectrographs provide. Recent developments in astrophotonics (Bland-Hawthorn & Horton 2006, Bland-Hawthorn et al. 2010) and adaptive optics (AO) enable single mode fiber (SMF) fed, high resolution spectrographs, which can realize the next step in precision. SMF feeds have intrinsic advantages over multimode fiber or slit coupled spectrographs: The intensity distribution at the fiber exit is extremely stable, and as a result the line spread function of a well-designed spectrograph is fully decoupled from input coupling conditions, like guiding or seeing variations (Ihle et al. 2010). Modal noise, a limiting factor in current multimode fiber fed instruments (Baudrand & Walker 2001), can be eliminated by proper design, and the diffraction limited input to the spectrograph allows for very compact instrument designs, which provide excellent optomechanical stability. A SMF is the ideal interface for new, very precise wavelength calibrators, like laser frequency combs (Steinmetz et al. 2008, Osterman et al. 2012), or SMF based Fabry-Perot Etalons (Halverson et al. 2013). At near infrared wavelengths, these technologies are ready to be implemented in on-sky instruments, or already in use. We discuss a novel concept for such a spectrograph.

High precision spectroscopy is one of the most successful methods to detect extra-solar planets. To enable the detection of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, extremely precise instruments are required. Our lack of knowledge of the instrument line profile, non-linearity and charge transfer efficiency effects in the detector limits the achievable precision of an instrument. We report our studies on the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial- velocity Planet Searcher) line profiles, measured using the unresolved lines of a Laser Frequency Comb (LFC). We show how the line profile changes as a function of position and signal, and estimate the errors made in the line centroid measurement due to the variation of the line profile.

Non gaussian sources of erros need to be taken into consideration when searching for planetary transits. Such phenomena are mostly caused by the impact of high energetic particles on the detector (Pinheiro da Silva et al. 2008). The detection efficiency of transits, therefor, depend significantly on the data quality and the algorithms utilized to deal with these errors sources. In this work we show that a modified detrend algorithm CDA (CoRoT Detrend Algorithm; Mislis et al. 2010) using a robust statistics and an empirical fit, instead of a polynomial one, can eliminate more efficiently gaps in the data and other long-term trends from the light-curve. Using this algorithm enables us to obtain a reconstructed light-curve with better signal-to-noise ratio that allows to improve the detection of exoplanet transits, although long term signals are destroyed. The results show that these modifications lead to an improved BLS (Box-fitting Least Squares; Kovács, Zucker & Mazeh 2002) algorithm spectrum. At the end we have compared our planetary search results with CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) satellite chromatic light-curves available in the literature.

Most of the discovered exoplanets are close to our sun. Usually their host star is with large proper motions, which is an important parameter for exoplanet searching. The first version of absolute proper motions catalog achieved based on Digitized Sky Survey Schmidt plate where outside the galactic plane |b|≥27° is presented, resulting in a zero point error less than ± 0.3 mas/yr, and the overall accuracy better than ± 4.5 mas/yr for objects brighter than RF=18.5, and ranging from 4.5 to 9.0 mas/yr for objects with magnitude 18.5<RF<20.5. The systematic errors of absolute proper motions related to the position, magnitude and color are practically all removed. The sky cover of this catalog is 22,525 degree2, the mean density is 6444 objects/degree2 and the magnitude limit is around RF=20.5.

We summarize the status of a computer simulator for microlens planet surveys. The simulator generates synthetic light curves of microlensing events observed with specified networks of telescopes over specified periods of time. Particular attention is paid to models for sky brightness and seeing, calibrated by fitting to data from the OGLE survey and RoboNet observations in 2011. Time intervals during which events are observable are identified by accounting for positions of the Sun and the Moon, and other restrictions on telescope pointing. Simulated observations are then generated for an algorithm that adjusts target priorities in real time with the aim of maximizing planet detection zone area summed over all the available events. The exoplanet detection capability of observations was compared for several telescopes.

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1989, though over 850 candidates have been verified (Schneider 2012), few are similar to our Earth in terms of mass and size. Hence here we would like to propose the revival and improvement of optical intensity interferometry to achieve sub-milliarcsecond resolution, which promises also to be less sensitive to weather conditions, light pollution and optomechanical alignments, yet only requiring baselines <100m.

This paper presents a summary of the HSTEP project: an effort to calculate the physical properties of the known transiting extrasolar planets using a homogeneous approach. I discuss the motivation for the project, list the 83 planets which have already been studied, run through some important aspects of the methodology, and finish with a synopsis of the results.

SPICES (Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging and Characterization of Exoplanetary Systems) was proposed in 2010 for a five-year M-class mission in the context of ESA Cosmic Vision. Its purpose is to image and characterize long-period extrasolar planets located at several AUs (0.5-10 AU) from nearby stars (<25 pc) with masses ranging from a few Jupiter masses down to super-Earths (~2 Earth radii, ~10 M⊕), possibly habitable. In addition, circumstellar disks as faint as a few times the zodiacal light in the Solar System can be studied. SPICES is based on a 1.5-m off-axis telescope and can perform spectro-polarimetric measurements in the visible (450 - 900 nm) at a spectral resolution of about 40. This paper summarizes the top science program and the choices made to conceive the instrument. The performance is illustrated for a few emblematic cases.

The NASA/DLR Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-meter infrared telescope on board a Boeing 747-SP, will conduct 0.3 - 1,600 μm photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging observations from altitudes as high as 45,000 ft., where the average atmospheric transmission is greater than 80 percent. SOFIA's first light cameras and spectrometers, as well as future generations of instruments, will make important contributions to the characterization of the physical properties of exoplanets. Our analysis shows that optical and near-infrared photometric and spectrophotometric follow-up observations during planetary transits and eclipses will be feasible with SOFIA's instrumentation, in particular the HIPO-FLITECAM optical/NIR instruments. The airborne-based platform has unique advantages in comparison to ground- and space-based observatories in this field of research which we will outline here. Furthermore we will present two exemplary science cases, that will be conducted in SOFIA's cycle 1.

Early design studies for the future Exo-Planet Imaging Camera and Specrotgraph (EPICS) on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) show the ability to probe the region of super-Earths in the habitable zone of stars within 5pc (including Gilese 581d). However, these planets will be lost to us if the correct choice of integral field spectrograph (IFS) technology is not selected for such an instrument the ability to fit and remove the speckle noise that remains is crucial to reaching these contrasts.

We conclusively demonstrate, though the use of an experimental setup producing an artificial speckle, that slicer based IFSs and post-processing using spectral deconvolution can achieve speckle rejection factors exceeding 103. Contrary to popular belief, we do not find any evidence that this choice of IFS technology limits the achievable contrast. Coupled with extreme adaptive optics and high performance coronographs, a slicer based integral field spectrograph could achieve contrasts exceeding 109, enabling these super-Earths to be detected in the habitable zone of nearby stars, making it an attractive option for the next generation of instruments being designed for the direct detection of extra solar planets.

We present radial-velocity measurements (RV) obtained in one of the numbers of programs underway to search for extrasolar planets with the spectrograph SOPHIE at the 1.93-m telescope of the Observatoire de Haute-Provence. Targets were selected from catalogs observed with ELODIE, which had been mounted previously at the telescope, in order to detect long-period planets with an extended database close to 15 years.

Many planets have been detected so far but very few around nearby stars that could allow characterization of their atmosphere thanks to their proximity. There are known exoplanets around less than 8.3% of the FGK stars of the Solar neighborhood (d<20 pc) and the vast majority of them are giant planets. Within the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan, the scientific goal of the NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is to detect and characterize planetary systems around these nearby stars in an exhaustive way down to 1 Earth-mass in the habitable zone. This survey would provide the actual planetary masses, the full characterization of the orbits including their inclination, for all the components of the planetary system down to the Earth-mass limit. NEAT will continue the work performed by Hipparcos and Gaia by reaching a precision that is improved by two orders of magnitude on pointed targets compared to Gaia. We present the free-flyer concept that has been submitted to the 2010 ESA call for M3 missions with two satellites flying in formation 40m apart.

We present and highlight the first results of the three main exoplanet surveys we are currently conducting at Universidad de Chile: CHEPS, Red Giant Exoplanets (radial velocity), and TraMoS (transit lightcurves). We have several interesting candidates at the Calan-Hertfordshire Extrasolar Planet Search (CHEPS) project, which is aimed at searching for the currently missing southern bright transiting planets at a few m/s radial velocity precision. Using the same technique, we are also characterizing the planetary population in a constrained sample of Red Giant stars. The Transit Monitoring from the South (TraMoS) project is aimed both at improving transit parameters and at detecting any kind of lightcurve variability from several known southern exoplanet systems.