EDDINGTON Terrestrial Planet Search

Eddington is a 1.2m space telescope with CCDs covering a 3-degree field with a 3-year mission. Its dual science goals are (1) stellar seismology and (2) to find transits of stars by terrestrial planets.

Eddington document repository.


Eddington-N proposal to implement Eddington as N clones of a smaller wide-field telescope.

2001 June Cordoba paper on Eddington planet catch simulations. .


  • Habitable (liquid water) zone.
  • Eddington predicted accuracy vs magnitude for 1 hour and 13 hour exposures. These are sequences of 30s exposures with 4.3s dead time between frames, repeated 105 times per hour.
  • Eddington bandpass including CCD quantum efficiency and 3 mirror reflections.
  • Lightcurves. A 48-hour segment of phase-folded data showing signal-to-noise for detection of transits of stars by planets with radius and temperature identical to Earth.
  • Cumulative and differential star counts for the Eddington field of view calculated for main sequence stars of spectral types O,B,A,F,G,K,M for galactic latitudes b=5,30,60,90. The star density is assumed to be N0 exp(-|z/H|) where N0 is the local star density, z is height above Galactic plane, and H is scal height. N0 and H depend on spectral type. Dust is assumed to have a 140pc exponential scale height, and results are shown for 1 mag/kpc (solid lines) and 0.5 mag/kpc (dashed lines). The model is compared with observed star counts (stars).
  • Monte-Carlo simulation of the planet catch for Galactic latitude 90, 60, 30, 10.
  • Monte-Carlo catalog of planet catch for Galactic latitude 90, 60, 30, 10.
  • Planet Radius vs Temperature for Galactic latitude 90, 60, 30, 10.
  • Histogram plots of total and habitable planet catch. Cumulative counts vs planet radius for Galactic latitude 90, 60, 30, 10. Differential counts vs planet radius for Galactic latitude 90, 60, 30, 10.
  • For Kepler assumtions (2 planets/star in HZ, 60 Earths/Jupiter), the Eddington planet catch for Galactic latitude 10 will have the following cumulative, and differential distributions in planet radius, and in r vs T.
  • Mass-radius plot for solar-system bodies.
  • ed_250-350k.dat. Estimated number of ``Habitable Earths'' (Earth radius, 250-350K temp), that Eddington may find if all stars have 1.
  • ed_3-5d.dat
  • . Estimated number of ``Hot Earths'' (Earth radius, 3-5 day period), that Eddington may find if all stars have 1.

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    Keith Horne (kdh1@st-andrews.ac.uk)