A New Gas Cell for High-Precision Doppler Measurements in the Near-Infrared

Abstract

High-resolution spectroscopy in the near-infrared could become the leading method for discovering extra-solar planets around very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. To help to achieve an accuracy of ~m/s, we are developing a gas cell which consists of a mixture of gases whose absorption spectral lines span all over the near-infrared region. We present the most promising mixture, made of acetylene, nitrous oxide, ammonia, chloromethans and hydrocarbons. The mixture is contained in a small size 13 cm long gas cell and covers most of the H and K-bands. It also shows small absorptions in the J-band but they are few and not sharp enough for near infrared wavelength calibration. We describe the working method and experiments and compare our results with the state of the art for near infrared gas cells.

11 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (3)

• High-precision wavelength calibration of astronomical spectrographs with laser frequency combs
• A new list of thorium and argon spectral lines in the visible
• A Pathfinder Instrument for Precision Radial Velocities in the Near-Infrared

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Design and Construction of Absorption Cells for Precision Radial Velocities in the K Band using Methane Isotopologues
• Astronomical Spectroscopy
• A multi-method approach to radial-velocity measurement for single-object spectra
• Detecting Planets around Very Cool Dwarfs at Near Infrared Wavelengths with the Radial Velocity Technique
• Retrieval of Precise Radial Velocities from Near-Infrared High Resolution Spectra of Low Mass Stars
• Ammonia-methane ratios from H-band near-infrared spectra of late-T and Y dwarfs