and Astronomy, Indiana University
Science with FHiRE
As ever-larger telescopes are constructed, the research role of smaller telescopes (less than 4 meters) is increasingly directed towards large, wide-field surveys of relatively bright targets. FHiRE was originally designed by Drs. Catherine Pilachowski and Constantine Deliyannis at Indiana University for stellar abundance studies of bright stars. FHiRE provides the spectral resolution to enable detailed abundance studies for stars brighter than V ~ 14 enabling the abundance enrichment history of our galaxy, the Milky Way, to be characterized in considerable detail. Wyoming astronomers plan to use to FHiRE to provide high resolution spectroscopic followup for targets for the TESS survey. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is a NASA Small Explorer (TESS) Mission to obtain high precision photometry of about 200,000 stars brighter than V ~ 15 in order to search for the signature of transiting planets. TESS is expected to discover approximately 20,000 exoplanet systems. These star systems will require high precision radial velocity follow-up in order to constrain the masses of the planets. FHiRE is one of only about 10 spectrographs world-wide that will be capable of acquiring these data. Long-term observations over many years with a stable spectrograph are vital for this effort. The 2.3 meter telescope available to Wyoming astronomers (WIRO) is ideally suited for such a survey and FHiRE makes this possible.
The 2.3 meter telescope of the Wyoming Infrared Observatory ( WIRO ) was originally designed for near- and mid-infrared wavelengths using single element detectors. As a result it has a very high f-ratio at the Cassegrain focus (f/27), making the image scale too high for the typical medium-field Cassegrain instrument equiped with modern array detectors. However, WIRO is idealy suited for the spectroscopy of bright stars.