HATSouth is the world’s first network of automated and homogeneous telescopes that is capable of year-round 24-hour monitoring of positions over an entire hemisphere of the sky. The goal of the network is to discover and characterize a large number of transiting exoplanets, reaching out to long periods and down to small planetary radii. HATSouth also probes a population of lower mass stars including m-dwarfs which are not monitored in shallower exoplanet transit surveys.
HATSouth monitors extended areas on the sky, deriving high precision light curves for a large number of stars, searching for the signature of planetary transits, and confirming and characterizing planetary candidates with larger telescopes. The project employs six telescope units spread over three prime locations with large longitude separation in the southern hemisphere: Las Campanas Observatory (Chile), HESS site (Namibia), and Siding Spring Observatory (Australia). Each of the HATSouth units holds four 0.18 m diameter telescope tubes on a common mount producing a 64 sq. deg. field-of-view on the sky.
We will present an overview of the HATSouth network, summarize operations over the first 2.5 years, and present the current HATSouth exoplanet discoveries to date, including the characterization of these exoplanetary systems.