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The detection of exoplanets using Radial Velocity (RV) measurements is commonly limited by the temperature and pressure stability of spectrographs and efficient fibre scrambling. Additionally, noise from stellar activity is becoming increasingly important, particularly in giant stars, where the amplitude of pulsations is comparable to RV signals from hot-Jupiters. Thus, long-baseline RV measurements are required to measure the intrinsic pulsations of the host star and de-correlate them to search for the planetary signals. This is impractical using large telescopes, but possible to do on bright stars with 0.2-0.4m class telescopes, provided they can be fitted with cheap high-resolution spectrographs. In this talk I will report on the current status of development of the RHEA spectrograph, an inexpensive compact single-mode fibre-fed spectrograph being developed at Macquarie University and ANU currently serving as the basis for a series of spectrographs to be deployed on other amateur sized telescopes for exoplanet and asteroseismological studies. |
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