PoET: the Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope

Abstract

The detection and characterisation of other "Earths", orbiting other suns, is a bold objective of present-day astrophysics. However, this quest is severely challenged by astrophysical "noise" from the host stars, whose signatures distort the observed spectra. Motivated by this problem, we are building a dedicated facility, the Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET). PoET will collect solar light and channel it into the ESPRESSO spectrograph, allowing us to use the Sun as a proxy to unambiguously identify and understand the sources of relevant variability in solar-type stars.