'We have been awaiting the arrival of KPF for nearly a decade, and we are thrilled to be able to take our already very successful exoplanet discovery program to the next level.' 'The advent of KPF marks a major and exciting step forward in our ability to advance the quest to eventually find habitable earth-like planets around other stars,' says Hilton Lewis, director of Keck Observatory. 'I'm excited to use the instrument to study the great diversity of exoplanets and to tease apart the mysteries of how they formed and evolved to their present states.' 'Seeing KPF's first astronomical spectrum was a moving experience,' says Andrew Howard, the KPF principal investigator and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. While KPF will routinely observe stars, the KPF team chose to celebrate KPF's planet-finding capabilities by directly observing Jupiter in our own solar system. The instrument, which uses the 'wobble' or radial velocity method of planet hunting, achieved so-called first light on November 9, 2022, which means it captured its first data from the sky, in this case from the planet Jupiter.

Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi is now primed and ready to search for and characterize hundreds, and ultimately, thousands of exoplanets, including the missing, smaller ones. That will soon change as the Caltech-led Keck Planet Finder (KPF) instrument at W. However, the quest for small planets similar to Earth-those most promising in the search for alien life-has been limited due to the miniscule effects that these planets have on their host stars. The planets come in many sizes and compositions and include everything from molten lava worlds to gas giant planets larger than Jupiter.

More than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars beyond our sun, have been spotted over the last 30 years, and discoveries from space and ground-based telescopes continue to roll in.

Siren world space haven