Nightside condensation of iron in an ultrahot giant exoplanet.

Ultrahot giant exoplanets receive thousands of times Earth's insolation. Their high-temperature atmospheres (greater than 2,000 kelvin) are ideal laboratories for studying extreme planetary climates and chemistry. Daysides are predicted to be cloud-free, dominated by atomic species and much hotter than nightsides.

A spectrograph for exoplanet observations calibrated at the centimetre-per-second level.

The best spectrographs are limited in stability by their calibration light source. Laser frequency combs are the ideal calibrators for astronomical spectrographs. They emit a spectrum of lines that are equally spaced in frequency and that are as accurate and stable as the atomic clock relative to which the comb is stabilized.

Laser frequency combs for astronomical observations.

A direct measurement of the universe's expansion history could be made by observing in real time the evolution of the cosmological redshift of distant objects. However, this would require measurements of Doppler velocity drifts of approximately 1 centimeter per second per year, and astronomical spectrographs have not yet been calibrated to this tolerance. We demonstrated the first use of a laser frequency comb for wavelength calibration of an astronomical telescope.