ESPRESSO (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) on ESO’s very Large Telescope has made its first successful observations. This spectrograph, on which the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has collaborated, will look for exoplanets with unprecedented accuracy, by detecting minuscule changes of velocity in the stars which host planetary systems.

This instrument, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has collaborated, has used, for the first time, the combined light of the four telescopes which make up the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

An international team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias participated, as well as institutions in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has confirmed the presence of the extrasolar planet Proxima b using measurements of radial velocity with the ESPRESSO spectrograph, on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.