The Mercator Observatory is located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). It consists of the Mercator Telescope, in operation since 2001, and the MARVEL telescope array, currently in the construction phase. The Mercator Observatory is operated by the staff of the Institute of Astronomy, University of Leuven (Belgium). It is named after the famous Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), who studied and taught at the University of Leuven.
The Mercator Telescope itself is a 1.2 m semi-robotic telescope. It is a stellar astrophysics machine equipped with a world-class high-resolution spectrograph HERMES. An optimised operational model and a technology development programme keep the infrastructure top notch. We study a variety of variable phenomena with a clear focus on stellar astrophysics and provide science enabling complementary ground-based support of international space missions like Kepler, TESS and GAIA and soon PLATO and CubeSpec.
Asteroseismology and the study of binary interaction physics play a fundamental role in understanding stellar evolution, and ultimately the chemical evolution of the Universe. Our Mercator observatory contributes to solving the many remaining puzzles in stellar astrophysics, from the lowest mass objects up to the progenitors of gravitational waves. We list here all the publications based on data obtained at Mercator.
The Mercator Observatory will soon be expanded with the MARVEL instrument, which is a new array of 4 telescopes dedicated to high-precision Radial-Velocity (RV) spectroscopy. The primary goals of MARVEL are to enable the scientific harvest of cornerstone exoplanet space missions like TESS, PLATO and ARIEL, as well as specific science drivers for characterisation of hosts stars as well as dedicated monitoring programmes of stellar systems.
The MARVEL telescope array and spectrograph are built by an international collaboration lead by the KU Leuven. In January 2024 the civil construction works started.
MELCHIORS (Mercator Library of High Resolution Stellar Spectroscopy) published
MoreAstronomers have identified a 33 solar-mass stellar black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.
MoreThe civil works for the telescope platform and the spectrograph building have started!
MoreOr take a virtual tour of the telescope dome.