Leonhard Euler Telescope, or the Swiss EULER Telescope, is a national, fully automatic

reflecting telescope A reflecting telescope (also called a reflector) is a telescope that uses a single or a combination of curved mirrors that reflect light and form an image. The reflecting telescope was invented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton as an alternati ...

, built and operated by the

Geneva Observatory The Geneva Observatory (french: Observatoire de Genève, german: Observatorium von Genf) is an astronomical observatory at Sauverny (CH) in the municipality of Versoix, Canton of Geneva, in Switzerland. It shares its buildings with the astronomy d ...

. It is located at an altitude of at ESO's

La Silla Observatory La Silla Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Chile with three telescopes built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Several other telescopes are located at the site and are partly maintained by ESO. The observatory is ...

site in the Chilean Norte Chico region, about 460 kilometers north of

Santiago de Chile Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

. The telescope, which saw its first light on 12 April 1998, is named after Swiss mathematician Leonhard Paul Euler. The Euler telescope uses the CORALIE instrument to search for

exoplanets An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917 but was not recognized as such. The first confirmation of detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, init ...

. In addition, the telescope uses the multi-purpose EulerCam (ecam), a high precision

photometry Photometry can refer to: * Photometry (optics), the science of measurement of visible light in terms of its perceived brightness to human vision * Photometry (astronomy), the measurement of the flux or intensity of an astronomical object's electro ...

instrument, and a smaller, piggyback mounted telescope, called "Pisco". Its first discovery was a planet in orbit around

Gliese 86 Gliese 86 (13 G. Eridani, HD 13445) is a K-type main-sequence star approximately 35 light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It has been confirmed that a white dwarf orbits the primary star. In 1998 the European Southern Obs ...

, determined to be a

hot Jupiter Hot Jupiters (sometimes called hot Saturns) are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital periods (). The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere tem ...

with an orbital period of only 15.8 earth days and about four times the mass of Jupiter. Since then, many other exoplanets have been discovered or examined in follow-up observations. Together with the

Mercator Telescope The Mercator Telescope is a 1.2 m telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos on La Palma. It is operated by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven University), Belgium, in collaboration with the Observatory of the University o ...

, Euler was part of the Southern Sky extrasolar Planet search Programme, which has discovered numerous extrasolar planets. It has also been frequently employed for follow-up characterization to determine the mass of exoplanets discovered by the Wide Angle Search for Planets,

SuperWASP WASP or Wide Angle Search for Planets is an international consortium of several academic organisations performing an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using transit photometry. The array of robotic telescopes aims to survey the entire sky, ...

Instruments

The ''CORALIE spectrograph'' is an

echelle An echelle grating (from French ''échelle'', meaning "ladder") is a type of diffraction grating characterised by a relatively low groove density, but a groove shape which is optimized for use at high incidence angles and therefore in high diffract ...

type spectrograph used for astronomy. It is a copy of the

ELODIE spectrograph ELODIE was an echelle spectrograph installed on the 1.93m reflector at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in south-eastern France. Its optical instrumentation was developed by André Baranne from the Marseille Observatory. The purpose of the instr ...

used by

Michel Mayor Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor (; born 12 January 1942) is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva's Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory o ...

and

Didier Queloz Didier Patrick Queloz (; born 23 February 1966) is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the ...

to detect the planet orbiting a star . In April 1998 it was built and installed at the Euler Telescope. Later in 2007 it was upgraded by

and his team to increase its performances to support

Wide Angle Search for Planets WASP or Wide Angle Search for Planets is an international consortium of several academic organisations performing an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using transit photometry. The array of robotic telescopes aims to survey the entire sky, ...

program and

Next-Generation Transit Survey The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets. The facility is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, about 2 km from ESO's Very Large Telescope and 0.5 km ...

. The instrument is optimized to measure Doppler effect on a star's

electromagnetic spectrum The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of frequencies (the spectrum) of electromagnetic radiation and their respective wavelengths and photon energies. The electromagnetic spectrum covers electromagnetic waves with frequencies ranging fro ...

with great precision to detect the gravitational tug of an exoplanet orbiting around it.ESO publication, D. Queloz and M. Mayor
From CORALIE to HARPS
September 2001 It also known as "radial velocity" or "wobble" method, is an indirect detection method. The mass of the planet can be estimated from these measurements. The spectrograph participates in th
Southern Sky extrasolar Planet search Programme
initiated by

In 2010 visible camera EulerCam was installed by

. Camera main objective was to measure planet by

transit method Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty o ...

by supporting ground base program such as

. The size of an exoplanet can be estimated using the transit method. By combining the measured size and mass from both methods, it can be determined whether the observed exoplanet is gaseous or rocky.

Characteristics

The resolution of CORALIE is fixed at R = 50,000 with a 3 pixel sampling. The detector CCD is 2k X 2k with a 15 micrometer pixel size.

Discovered exoplanets

First five planetary object discovered using CORALIE are

Gallery

File:Lso-swiss.jpg, The 1.2-meter Leonhard Euler Telescope Image:LaSillaByNight2.jpg, Euler Telescope with the ESO 3.6-meter in the background File:The Swiss 1.2-metre Leonhard Euler Telescope in its dome at La Silla.jpg, A fisheye view of the Euler Telescope File:La Silla from 3,6m.jpg, La Silla with NTT in the center and Euler on the right File:Exoplanet Hunters at La Silla.jpg, Euler and ESO 3.6-meter are both exoplanet hunters at La Silla File:Moonlight and Zodiacal Light Over La Silla Observatory.jpg, Moonlight and Zodiacal Light Over La Silla Observatory File:La Silla - Evening.jpg, Sunset at ESO's La Silla observatory in Chile File:Fantastic Mr Fox.jpg, Fantastic Mr Fox

Video

References

External links

ESO La Silla 1.2m Leonhard Euler Telescope

www.exoplanets.ch

University of Geneva – The Geneva Observatory

{{Exoplanet search projects Optical telescopes European Southern Observatory Spectrographs Astronomical instruments Telescope instruments Exoplanet search projects Articles containing video clips