Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2016
Since the discovery of 51 Peg by Mayor & Queloz (1995) about 50 extra-solar planets have been discovered by means of the Doppler technique, and much more will follow. In future the goal will be to detect even lighter planets and/or planets with longer orbital periods, which may induce changes of only few m/s on the radial velocity of their parent star. Therefore very high performance instruments will be required. In view of the realization of HARPS (Pepe et al. 2000), the high-accuracy RV spectrograph for the ESO 3.6-m telescope dedicated to extra-solar planet search, we are investigating the accuracy limits and possible error sources. First results are presented in this paper.