Although the #Nobel Prize 2019 was awarded to the 2 leading astronomers, the 51Peg b discovery was made possible thanks to a much broader team of technicians and engineers (here in 2005) from the #HauteProvence Observatory and the Marseille Observatory, especially André Baranne.

from left to right: J.-P. Berger, G. Knispel, J.-C. Baietto, G. Adrianzyk, D. Lacroix, A. Baranne, M. Mayor,
D. Queloz, D. Kohler, J.-P. Meunier, P. Véron, and P. Brunel.
A. Vin is missing in this picture.

All these optical elements can now be seen on the ground floor of the 1.93-m telescope at the #HauteProvence #Observatory (🇫🇷 ). Here are a few pictures of #ELODIE I took for you.

#Astronomy #exoplanet

To improve the radial velocity precision, #ELODIE had to be a much more stable instrument, in a temperature- and pressure-controlled environment which was not compatible with the dome.

So, André Baranne (a french astronomer at Marseille Observatory who also built #CORAVEL in 1977) suggested to use optical #fibers to feed the stellar light from the #telescope to the instrument. We can see these fibers in orange in this picture of the bonnette, mounted on the 1.93-m telescope at #HauteProvence.

The jump in precision between the #CORAVEL (300m/s) and the #ELODIE (10m/s) spectrographs was due to several achievements.

CORAVEL was mounted directly on the back of the swiss telescopes at either the #HauteProvence or #LaSilla observatories. In such case, the instrument's #optical and #mechanical components are deformed by #temperature, #humidity and the position of the telescope. Such deformation was a clear limitation to the radial velocity precision.