Finding Alien Worlds in Queensland — A Decade of MINERVA-Australis

Three decades ago, humanity entered the Exoplanet Era, with the discovery of the first planets orbiting other stars. Today, more than 6000 exoplanets are known – a tally recently bolstered by NASA’s TESS spacecraft.

Whilst TESS is an exceptional planet finding machine, dedicated follow-up observations from the ground are required to confirm the existence of the planets it discovers. To achieve this, we constructed the southern hemisphere’s only dedicated exoplanet detection and characterisation facility, MINERVA-Australis, at the University of Southern Queensland’s Mt Kent Observatory.

Funded in 2015, MINERVA-Australis saw first light in 2018, in time for the launch of TESS. MINERVA-Australis has since been scouring the skies, working to confirm and characterise the incredible harvest of planets detected by TESS.

To date, the facility has contributed to the discovery of 40 new exoplanets, and continued the legacy of radial velocity data from the Anglo-Australian Planet Search program.

Jonathan Horner, Robert A. Wittenmyer, Stephen R. Kane, John Kielkopf, Duncan Wright

Comments: 13 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 24th Australian Space Research Conference, held in Melbourne, Australia, from 24th to 26th November, 2025
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.05449 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2605.05449v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05449
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Submission history
From: Jonathan Horner
[v1] Wed, 6 May 2026 21:22:10 UTC (527 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05449
Astrobiology, exoplanet,