The NGTS telescopes operating at ESO Paranal, Chile (Credit: ESO/ G. Lambert)

Excerpt from  space.com

A new alien-planet–hunting telescope has just come online in Chile, and it could help scientists peer into the atmospheres of relatively small planets circling nearby stars.

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS for short) — located at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory — is designed to seek out planets two to eight times the diameter of Earth as they pass in front of their stars. Such a planet will cause the light of the star to dip ever so slightly when passing in front of it, allowing the telescope to detect the planet during its transit.

“We are excited to begin our search for small planets around nearby stars,” Peter Wheatley, an NGTS project lead from the University of Warwick, U.K., said in as statement. “The NGTS discoveries, and follow-up observations by telescopes on the ground and in space, will be important steps in our quest to study the atmospheres and composition of small planets such as the Earth.”

 
The instrument is designed to measure the brightness of stars more accurately than any other ground-based wide-field survey, ESO officials said. The NGTS is made up of 12 telescopes that will operate robotically, according to ESO. Astronomers using the survey hope to find small, bright planets in order to learn more about the densities of them.