The Department of Astronomy receives the UNIGE innovation medal
The University of Geneva's Astronomy Department, also known as the Geneva Observatory, is a leading player in the development and operation of high-precision spectrographs for astrophysics research, particularly in the field of exoplanets.
The world's most precise astronomical spectrograph emerged from the Observatory's clean room in 2017: ESPRESSO is now installed on the VLT, Europe's largest telescopes. In 2023, NIRPS, another precision spectrograph operating this time in the infrared, was commissioned. Alongside it was HARPS, the instrument with which the Geneva Observatory launched the hunt for "super-Earths" in 2003 and which set the example for all future spectrographs.
Swiss hegemony is the result of a long tradition of building cutting-edge instruments, which requires the development of new technologies and enables numerous scientific discoveries that would otherwise be unattainable. This institutional culture, rooted in the Geneva Observatory's early days, further developed with the construction of the first spectrographs, which led to the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. This discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.
But the race for excellence continues unabated. Scientists at the University of Geneva are already working on the next generations of instruments, such as RISTRETTO, which will combine high-resolution spectroscopy with sufficient angular resolution to observe the reflected light from Proxima b, the closest exoplanet to Earth, as well as ANDES, the spectrograph that will equip the giant 39m diameter telescope and will be capable of observing the atmospheres of small exoplanets with unprecedented detail.