The next RED School will be March 14-20, 2027
Discover the school program and apply
Here’s the team of teachers in charge of this year’s courses, with whom you’ll have the opportunity to interact
Exoplanets, Stellar kinematics, Doppler spectroscopy, Galactic dynamics
Michel Mayor is a professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva. He developed the technique of cross-correlation Doppler spectroscopy for high-precision measurements of stellar radial velocities. Beginning in the 1970s, his research focused on stellar kinematics. Advances in this instrumentation (ELODIE) enabled him, together with Didier Queloz, to discover the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. This discovery ushered in an exciting new chapter in astronomy—a discovery honored in 2019 with the Nobel Prize in Physics. More than 20 years ago, he initiated the construction of the HARPS spectrograph, installed on the 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla. This instrument, with a precision of 1 m/s, enabled an ambitious survey for the search and characterization of planets in the southern hemisphere. The discovery of the rich subpopulation of so-called “super-Earths” is the result of this research. The boreal counterpart to this instrument, HARPS-N, was installed at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma) on the Galileo telescope to determine the masses of the numerous rocky planets discovered by the Kepler mission.