ESO 3.6 m Telescope
The ESO -3 ,6- m telescope is an optical and near-infrared reflecting telescope with a 3.57 meter dish in an equatorial fork mount. It belongs to the European Southern Observatory and is part of the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The telescope is located at an altitude of 2400 m at the coordinates 29 ° 15 ' 39 " S, 70 ° 43' 54 " W - 29.26097 - 70.731692400.
Built in 1976, it was fully operational in 1977. End of the 70s of the 20th century was, with its nearly 3.6 m diameter mirror and a mirror surface of 8.6 m2 one of the largest optical telescopes in the world and thus supported a number of achievements of science and technology. It waited in the 80s on one of the first adaptive optics for astronomical community. As of 2009, the telescope was then instrumental in the discovery of a possible 75 exoplanets.
A renovation in 1999 and the equipment with a new secondary mirror in 2004 brought it to the present stand
Instruments
Since April 2008, the HARPS, an acronym for High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, the only instrument on the ESO 0.6 -3 - m telescope. HARPS is a glass fiber -guided, high-resolution echelle spectrograph dedicated solely to the search for extrasolar planets.
Former instruments
- CES: A spectrograph with a spectral resolution of up to 235000 in the wavelength range of ( 346-1028 ) nm
- EFOSC2: The ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera ( v.2 ), a very versatile instrument for low resolution and image creation, now also at the New Technology Telescope installed.
- TIMMI -2: The Thermal Infrared Multimode Instrument worked in the spectral range from 3 microns to 25 microns.
- ADONIS: An acronym for Adaptive Optics Near Infrared System, was an adaptive optics system of the second generation. More than 40 scientific peer-reviewed articles have been published on data base of this instrument. ADONIS is the most sophisticated version of various adaptive optics (AO) prototypes. In its final version in October 1996, it became an official ESO instrument, and placed out of service in 2001. ADONIS was the first AO system with the work a greater number of astronomers.
Discoveries
The ESO -3 ,6- m telescope has been instrumental since the day of his First Light at numerous scientific discoveries. Especially lately, it was by the HARPS on the one hand possible to find the least massive exoplanet at the time of its discovery in 2009; Gliese 581 e is only twice the mass of our Earth. On the other hand, the planetary system was discovered with the currently up most of the planets; seven planets orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180th
The telescope was also part in the investigation of the decades-old mystery of the mass of the Cepheid variable star class. With HARPS, it was possible to determine the exact mass of the Cepheids within a land cover binary star system with a Cepheid and a normal star, resulting in a confirmation of the theory of the relation between stellar mass and Pulsationsdauer.
The discovery of the exoplanet Gliese 581 c by Stéphane Udry, inter alia, of the Observatory of the University of Geneva was announced on 24 April 2007. The team used the HARPS and analyzed the radial velocities to measure the effect of the planet on the star.
Comparison with other telescopes of the same generation
Telescope and location
The road to the ESO 0.6 -3 - m telescope.
In the right foreground the Leonhard Euler Telescope, the ESO -3 ,6- m telescope in the background.
Panoramic view inside the dome of the ESO 0.6 -3 - m telescope.
Early evening at the ESO La Silla Observatory, the 3.6 m telescope right back. Credit: ESO.
Construction site of the ESO -3 ,6- meter telescope.
Pictures
More
- List of largest optical telescopes