MAROON-X instrument built by UChicago team measures its first planet In the past two decades, scientists have discovered more and more planets orbiting distant stars—but in some sense, they’re still just dots on a map. “It’s kind of like looking at a map of Europe and seeing the dot that’s labeled ‘Paris,’” said University of Chicago astrophysicist Jacob Bean. “You know where it is, but there’s a whole lot that you’re missing about the city.” Scientists are developing new telescopes and instruments to fill in more and more of that picture. Bean led the creation of one such instrument called MAROON-X, which was installed at the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii last year. It allowed scientists to not only confirm the existence of the third-nearest star with a transiting exoplanet, but to take extraordinarily precise measurements of that planet and discover that it is rocky like Earth.