Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2015

41 SPACE CHRONICLES planets that are bright enough for the planetary mass to be measured. This will allow planetary densities to be deduced, which in turn pro- vides clues about the composition of the planets. It may also be possi- ble to probe the atmospheres of the exoplanets whilst they are in transit. During the transit some of the star’s light passes through the plan- et’s atmosphere, if it has one, and leaves a tiny, but detectable, signa- ture. So far only a few such very delicate observations have been made, but NGTS should provide many more potential targets. This is the first telescope project hosted, but not operated, by ESO on Paranal. Several telescope proj- ects operating under similar ar- rangements are already at work at the older La Silla Observatory. The NGTS data will flow into the ESO M ost of the 20-centimetre tele- scopes that form the survey system are shown in this picture tak- en during testing. [ESO/R. West] T his time-lapse sequence shows the enclosure that contains the Next- Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) at ESO's Paranal Ob- servatory in Chile. The domes of VISTA (right) and the VLT (left) are also visible on the horizon. [ESO/G. Lambert] archivesystem and will be available to astronomers worldwide for de- cades to come. Peter Wheatley, one of the NGTS project leads from the University of Warwick, concludes: “We are excited to begin our search for small planets around nearby stars. The NGTS discoveries, and fol- low-up observations by telescopes on the ground and in space, will be important steps in our quest to study the atmospheres and compo- sition of small planets such as the Earth.” The NGTS Consortium is composed of the University of Warwick, UK; the Queen’s University of Belfast, UK; the University of Leicester, UK; the University of Cambridge, UK; Geneva University, Switzerland and DLR Berlin, Germany. n