by Ludwig Scheibe (TU Berlin), March 2025
The Next Generation Transit Survey NGTS is a ground-based survey looking for extrasolar planets via the transit method. It uses an array of 12 remote-controlled and automated telescopes located at ESO‘s Paranal Observatory in Chile, not far from the VLT. The telescopes were built and are operated by an international consortium from 6 institutes from the UK, Switzerland and Germany.
It measured its first light in 2015 and roughly 100 publications have been made using data from NGTS (as of March 2025). Apart from exoplanet discoveries and follow-up observations, the telescope array is also used to study variable stars, stellar flares and supernovae.
The interested public can help find planetary transits in NGTS’ data via the Planet Hunters NGTS citizen science project.
Long-exposure photograph of the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescopes at Paranal observatory. The rings are the apparent paths of the stars over the sky over most of the night, with the moon in the center. On the hill to the left, the VLT can be seen. Credit: ESO/G. Lambert under CC-BY 4.0.
Links for further reading:
- NGTS webpage by the consortium
- NGTS overview page by ESO
- NGTS review paper by Wheately et al. (2017). Also available on arXiv.