The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a facility operated by the European Southern Observatory, located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It consists of four individual telescopes, each equipped with a primary mirror that measures 8.2 meters in diameter. These optical telescopes, named Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun, are generally used separately but can be combined to achieve a very high angular resolution. The VLT array is also complemented by four movable Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) with 1.8-meter apertures.
Michel Gustave Édouard Mayor 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 of Geneva. He is co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Jim Peebles and Didier Queloz, and the winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize and the 2015 Kyoto Prize.
The ESO 3.6 m Telescope is an optical reflecting telescope run by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla Observatory, Chile since 1977, with a clear aperture of about 3.6 metres (140 in) and 8.6 m2 (93 sq ft) area.
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 one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and was the first in Chile to be used by ESO.
Didier Patrick Queloz 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 University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.
Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star of spectral type M3V at the center of the Gliese 581 planetary system, about 20.5 light years away from Earth in the Libra constellation. Its estimated mass is about a third of that of the Sun, and it is the 101st closest known star system to the Sun. Gliese 581 is one of the oldest, least active M dwarfs known. Its low stellar activity improves the likelihood of its planets retaining significant atmospheres, and lessens the sterilizing impact of stellar flares.
Mu Arae c, also known as HD 160691 c, formally named Dulcinea, is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star Mu Arae of the constellation Ara. It was the first 'hot Neptune' to be discovered.
Stéphane Udry is an astronomer at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, whose current work is primarily the search for extra-solar planets. He and his team, in 2007, discovered a possibly terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of the Gliese 581 planetary system, approximately 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. He also led the observational team that discovered HD 85512 b, another most promisingly habitable exoplanet.
HD 40307 c is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star HD 40307, located 42 light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Pictor. The planet was discovered by the radial velocity method, using the HARPS apparatus, in June 2008. Of the six proposed planets in the HD 40307 star system, it is the third-largest, and has the second-closest orbit from the star. The planet is of interest as this star has relatively low metallicity, supporting a hypothesis that different metallicities in protostars determine what kind of planets they will form.
Leonhard Euler Telescope, or the Swiss EULER Telescope, is a national, fully automatic 1.2-metre (47 in) reflecting telescope, built and operated by the Geneva Observatory. It is located at an altitude of 2,375 m (7,792 ft) 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.
An exoplanet is a planet located outside the Solar System. The first evidence of an exoplanet was noted as early as 1917, but was not recognized as such until 2016; no planet discovery has yet come from that evidence. What turned out to be the first detection of an exoplanet was published among a list of possible candidates in 1988, though not confirmed until 2003. The first confirmed detection came in 1992, with the discovery of terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. The first confirmation of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star was made in 1995, when a giant planet was found in a four-day orbit around the nearby star 51 Pegasi. Some exoplanets have been imaged directly by telescopes, but the vast majority have been detected through indirect methods, such as the transit method and the radial-velocity method. As of 1 November 2023, there are 5,521 confirmed exoplanets in 4,070 planetary systems, with 885 systems having more than one planet. This is a list of the most notable discoveries.
Gliese 581g was a candidate exoplanet postulated to orbit within the Gliese 581 system, twenty light-years from Earth. It was discovered by the Lick–Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, and was the sixth planet claimed to orbit the star; however, its existence could not be confirmed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) / High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) survey team, and was ultimately refuted. It was thought to be near the middle of the habitable zone of its star, meaning it could sustain liquid water—a necessity for all known life—on its surface, if there are favorable atmospheric conditions on the planet.
ESPRESSO is a third-generation, fiber fed, cross-dispersed, echelle spectrograph mounted on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). The unit saw its first light on September 25, 2016.
The Fiber-Optic Improved Next-Generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths is a radial-velocity spectrograph developed by Debra Fischer. It is installed on the 3 meter telescope in Lick Observatory in Mount Hamilton. It has been in operation since 2009 and is being used to verify exoplanet candidates found by Kepler.
HD 85512 b is a currently-disputed exoplanet orbiting HD 85512, a K-type main-sequence star approximately 37 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Vela.
HARPS-N, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere is a high-precision radial-velocity spectrograph, installed at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, a 3.58-metre telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.
The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a ground-based robotic dedicated exoplanet observatory. The facility is an array of small-aperture robotic telescopes outfitted for both photometry and high-resolution Doppler spectroscopy located at the U.S. Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory at Mt. Hopkins, Arizona. The project's principal investigator is the American astronomer Jason Eastman. The telescopes were manufactured by PlaneWave Instruments.
Teegarden's Star b is an exoplanet found orbiting within the habitable zone of Teegarden's Star, an M-type red dwarf 12.5 light years away from the Solar System. It has the highest Earth Similarity Index of any exoplanet found to-date. Along with Teegarden's Star c, it is among the closest known potentially habitable exoplanets.
