Leonhard Euler Telescope, or the Swiss EULER Telescope, is a national, fully automatic reflecting telescope, built and operated by the Geneva Observatory. It is located at an altitude of at ESO's La Silla Observatory site in the Chilean Norte Chico region, about 460 kilometers north of Santiago de Chile. The telescope, which saw its first light on 12 April 1998, is named after Swiss mathematician

Leonhard Paul Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

. The Euler telescope uses the CORALIE instrument to search for exoplanets. In addition, the telescope uses the multi-purpose EulerCam (ecam), a high precision photometry instrument, and a smaller, piggyback mounted telescope, called "Pisco". Its first discovery was a planet in orbit around Gliese 86, determined to be a hot Jupiter 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, 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.

Instruments

The ''CORALIE spectrograph'' is an echelle type

spectrograph An optical spectrometer (spectrophotometer, spectrograph or spectroscope) is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify mate ...

used for astronomy. It is a copy of the ELODIE spectrograph used by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz 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 Didier Queloz and his team to increase its performances to support Wide Angle Search for Planets program and Next-Generation Transit Survey. The instrument is optimized to measure

Doppler effect The Doppler effect or Doppler shift (or simply Doppler, when in context) is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source. It is named after the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, who d ...

on a star's electromagnetic spectrum 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 Michel Mayor In 2010 visible camera EulerCam was installed by Didier Queloz. Camera main objective was to measure planet by transit method by supporting ground base program such as Wide Angle Search for Planets . 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 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 ...

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