[1] Rebecca Oppenheimer, associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, is the principal investigator for the project.
[2] The two main instruments behind Project 1640 is an Integral field spectrograph (IFS) and an Apodized-pupil Lyot coronagraph at the Hale Telescope at Palomar.
The instrument uses the chromatic nature of the speckle noise to distinguish it from any true astrophysical companions, including software which increases sensitivity by 10-20 times.
It imaged four red exoplanets orbiting the star HR8799, 128 light years away from Earth, determining the spectra for all four.
At normal temperatures, such as those surrounding the four exoplanets, ammonia and methane should both be present in significant amounts.