Contributions > By speaker > Bouchy Francois

The Near-InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS – Bouchy et al. 2025) is a new high-resolution, high-stability near-infrared spectrograph. Optimized for detecting and characterizing exoplanets around M dwarfs, NIRPS operates in tandem with HARPS. The NIRPS consortium started a GTO program in April 2023, totaling 725 nights over 5 years. Part of the GTO is dedicated to search for cold giant planets around M dwarfs, as part of the blind radial-velocity (RV) survey and the long-term monitoring of transiting planets. Giant planets around M dwarfs are relatively rare compared to FGK dwarfs, but they do exist. The 20-year HARPS survey gives an occurrence rate of a few % for giant planets with wide separation around M dwarfs (Mignon et al. 2025). We will give an overview of NIRPS performance and first results, including the planetary system TOI-756b,c (Parc et al. 2025) with a cold eccentric giant. We will discuss the strong synergy between NIRPS RVs and Gaia astrometry to refine the orbital solution of cold giant planets. We will also discuss the uniqueness of the HARPS-NIRPS tandem for the RV follow-up of cold giant candidates transiting M-dwarf to be revealed by PLATO.