The Observatoire de Haute-Provence, a French national astronomical facility established in 1937 near Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire in southeastern France, chosen for its roughly 170 fully cloudless nights a year. Operating telescopes up to 1.93 meters in aperture, it is where Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found orbiting a sun-like star, using the ELODIE spectrograph in 1995, a discovery that earned them half the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Facts
Observatory Typeastronomical observatory 1 LocationNear Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France 1 Measuresstellar radial velocities used to detect exoplanets, including the discovery of 51 Pegasi b 1 Classification
Observing Band FAQs
What was found at Haute-Provence Observatory that won a Nobel Prize?
51 Pegasi b was found there in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
In October 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. They made the observation at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, using custom-made instruments, and saw the planet 51 Pegasi b, a gaseous ball comparable with Jupiter, the solar system's biggest gas giant. The discovery earned the two astronomers a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Haute-Provence Observatory
Introduction
An astronomical observatory in the southeast of France
Location description
near the village of Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence departement
Founding statement
It was established in 1937 as a national facility for French astronomers.
51 Pegasi b discovery section
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi from observations made using ELODIE on the 1.93 m telescope.
1.93m telescope description
The 1.93 m telescope was built by Grubb Parsons and installed at the site in 1958.
In Group: Optical Observatories of Europe, Lead sentence
The Haute-Provence Observatory (OHP, French: Observatoire de Haute-Provence) is an astronomical observatory in the southeast of France, about 90 km east of Avignon and 100 km north of Marseille.
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