1 February 2021
Since its first light in 2006, the high-resolution infrared CRIRES spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has made a number of exciting scientific discoveries. The new and improved CRIRES
+, which has now seen first light, will develop the work of its predecessor and search for potentially habitable super-Earth exoplanets.
+, an instrument built by ESO in collaboration with a consortium of European institutes, will search the sky for super-Earths located within the habitable zones of nearby low-mass stars, the range of planetary orbits within which scientists believe a planet can support life. These types of planets are difficult to detect due to their relatively low masses. With CRIRES